Probably the best piece I’ve seen written so far on the gay rights movement and Proposition 8: Civil Rights and Gay Marriage.
It’s from Black and White, “Birmingham’s City Paper.” The author, Jeff Jacoby, is identified as a columnist for the Boston Globe. His question: where is the real bigotry and hate being displayed?
(I’ve viewed the Mormon-attacking commercial he describes at the end of the piece. I don’t agree much with the Mormons on some issues, but they way they’re treated in this piece is truly despicable. Gay rights leaders ought to be the first to denounce it.)
It does seem though that there has been a direction of progress with regard to civil rights in the United States. At each new step, however, people like Jacoby arose to draw a contrast to those steps that had been previously made. Consider the contrast that could have made between the right right not be enslaved and right to marry inter-racially. (And even if violations of the former are more reprehensible, this is no reason to oppose improvements.) The lesson of history is that civil rights violations tend to be easier to recognize in hindsight. This Wikipedia entry on anti-miscegenation laws is a fascinating reminder:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-miscegenation
Dang. CT beat me to it.
Interesting point. I’ve given it a lot of thought in the past 2-3 days, and I have a multi-part answer in mind, which I hope to publish elsewhere. Until then I will say this:
1. If the argument is that Christians have been embarrassingly wrong in the past about certain issues, that is at least partially correct, and we ought to take heed to it.
2. If the argument is that therefore we are wrong this time, that’s a rather obvious non-sequitir. I do not accuse you of making that simple error, but I thought I should at least make a point of it.
3. If the argument is that civil rights always moves onward to ever-increasing freedoms for ever more groups of people, there must obviously be a limit to that somewhere. Otherwise there would have to be, someday, a movement demanding equal rights for those who categorically deny equal rights; or equal rights for torturers, killers, terrorists, etc.
4. There must therefore be a point at which we recognize that to extend further rights to certain groups would be either incoherent, immoral, or both.
5. So the question is, where is that limit, and how would we know if we reached it?
6. If we believe we have some answer to (5), then it is perhaps incumbent on us to risk the embarrassment stated in (1). At some point a person has to take the risk that he might be wrong, and go ahead and take action anyway. That’s what gay rights supporters are doing, too, by the way; unless, that is, they are dogmatically certain there is absolutely no possibility that they might not be right.
First, history tells us that Jacoby’s argument is broken.
Second, you’re using a slippery slope argument, but such arguments would have left you in centuries past. So you’ll have to evaluate #4 and #5 without reference to what else would be allowed.
So what is the harm in gay marriage?
Consider what’s down the slippery slope… what is the problem with equal rights for killers?
Either we think icky people don’t deserve rights (e.g., many Christians don’t believe in equal rights for atheists), or else we are concerned that equal rights for icky people will lead to unequal rights for others (e.g., murder victims if we grant equal rights to killers).
So if we grant equal rights to gays, how will you be harmed (apart from letting icky people have rights)?
This is a secular question. If you grant equal rights to gays, you’re not saying you think homosexuality is moral. (You would grant equal rights to atheists, I assume, even if you think atheism is immoral.) In secular society, the question is about how granting a right to a group takes rights from others. I can’t see how granting gays rights harms you at all.
The only thing I can think of is that, by marginalizing gay people, some parents might escape or postpone talking to their kids about same sex people who are in love. They’re afraid they might have to talk about something icky with their kids, when saying that A loves B is all that needs to be said. I don’t find that a good reason to deny gay people the right to equal citizenship.
Interesting thoughts Mr.Gilson. The history lesson is merely meant to provoke humility and self-scrutiny. The parallel between present homophobic tendencies and past racist tendencies should give us pause. If we are not motivated by concern for the actual people whose rights are in question, then at least let us be concerned that our children and grandchildren may one day clearly recognize our parts in the present bigotry which shamefully masquerades as piety and concern for “marriage,” family and “traditional values.”
Mr. Gilson, in the present context can you be seriously concerned about granting “equal rights for torturers, killers, and terrorists”? If by “equal rights” we intend the right to a fair hearing, then let us certainly grant them rights.
As far as knowing when to grant rights, and how to recognize them, I suspect that the best we can do is follow the Rawlsian advice to seek “wide reflective equilibrium.”
doctor(logic),
No, it’s simply a statement that there must be a limit to equal treatment; that it cannot be extended indefinitely, so therefore logically there is a point at which that extension must logically stop. You can’t drive all the way from your house to Singapore, so there must be a point at which your drive must stop. Whether that ending point is in Virginia Beach or Laguna Beach I do not presume to say with this part of the argument; only that there must be one.
This is really unbecoming of you. “Icky people?” Come on. “Many Christians don’t believe in equal rights for atheists?” Please. Can you name one? Many atheists don’t believe in equal rights for Christians (I can name Dawkins and Harris as two rather non-obscure examples). But I’m not going to assume that means anything about atheists in general. Nor should you assume that your unnamed “Christians” speak for Christianity.
The problem is not just that we’re talking about “killers” but about “killing.” We’re not just talking about homosexuals as an identity group, but about homosexual behavior, which is always the issue in my mind.
icky, icky icky: your icky word, not mine. Why on earth do you think I consider homosexuals to be icky? Have you seen me describe any that way? Have you seen me interact with any that way?
Oh, and by the way, they have the same rights as anyone. They can marry. They can have families. They can do it with members of the opposite sex, just the way all of us can.
In a degenerating secular society the question becomes eternally, “What kinds of rights can I own and practice?” In a strengthening society, by contrast, the other question asked is, “What kinds of responsibilities toward this larger society do I own and shall I practice?” But we’re so far down that path, that statement probably seems shocking to you.
Granting “marriage” rights to same-sex couples harms me in that it contributes greatly to destabilizing the core institution of society, which is the family. It also very seriously places my own civil rights at risk.
Oh, and by the way, the slippery-slope argument, which I freely acknowledge I have used in the past on this topic (though not this time, as you mistakenly thought), is valid under certain circumstances. See the Wikipedia discussion, which recognizes the distinction; and see also here, here, here, and here.
CT,
If I thought that concern for marriage and traditional values today was shameful bigotry today, I would certainly share your concern that my descendants would be ashamed of my part in it. Is it possible that your attitude toward my values is shameful bigotry on your part? Maybe your descendants will be ashamed of your part in all of this.
Oh, I feel as if I’ve just done something awful! I’ve practically accused you of bigotry!! How terrible: except that’s exactly what you just did toward me; not to mention your accusations of masquerading piety and sham concerns for (in scare quotes) “marriage” and etc. Is it awful for me to say that of you, and yet okay for you to say even worse of me?
But let’s set that aside, because there’s an even more important, more fundamental question. We’re talking about how future generations will see us. Do you know the answer to that today? How? Do you know that your position is morally right? On what basis?
No. I’m not talking about “accused killers;” I’m talking about killers. As I said to doctor(logic) just now, I’m not even talking about the identity, I’m talking about the behavior. This debate is about endorsing a certain behavior.
(Please go back to the original context in which I wrote what I did. I said we cannot extend equal treatment to everyone, because at some point that would logically lead to extending equal treatment to killers (not accused killers, but known ones). That statement had a specific function in a specific argument, which I just rehearsed in my last comment just posted.)
Note also where your argument goes if I agree with it. Your analogy seems to be asking me to agree that we should grant homosexuals and killers equal rights: a fair hearing. Now, for (accused) killers, that fair hearing is in a court of law, with respect to an accusation of a crime. Is that really the direction you want to take this discussion? (For the record, it’s not anything I’ve proposed.)
As disinterested as possible, yes–as if that “original position” were possible in fact. Michael Novak wrote about Rawls recently, in his book No One Sees God,
It may be that the best we can do is actually something better than “wide reflective equilibrium.” It may be that there is revelation on these things from the God who created us.
And it may also be that even “wide reflective equilibrium” could lead us to the conclusion that a society focused entirely on expanding rights is in a precarious position (see my prior comment); and that it is unhealthy for a society to undercut its own most fundamental source of institutional strength for the sake of a small minority’s “rights” to engage in that undercutting behavior; and it may be that calling a Christian bigoted for the sake of his beliefs is pretty bigoted itself.
Tom, I would contend that in a strengthening society, individual rights and responsibilities to the community are in balance, neither one being missing. So fostering individual rights can be part of a proper social balance. Otherwise, you’d have to contend that, in a strong society, individual rights can be safely ignored, put off, not on the radar, not fought for, etc.
Of course.
OK, I was reading too carefully, it doesn’t really change your point anyway, sorry for the — what’s it called when you read something that someone wrote too carefully?
Tom,
George H. W. Bush.
I assume you read the comments about anti-miscegenation laws. Does your repetition of this claim mean you think anti-miscegenation laws were not a form of discrimination against non-whites?
I’m not following. We punish people for doing bad things (like killing), but in this case, that’s not what you’re advocating. It’s sort of like you’re saying that killers can kill, but cannot marry. You’re not outlawing the act you find so wrong, but instead targeting the expression of love between couples who commit that act.
I keep hearing this, but you’re not explaining it. If Fred wants to marry Mary, how, specifically, is their marriage harmed if Bob marries Bill?
So, would you say that the civil rights of racists are infringed by their inability to discriminate against blacks in the way they conduct their business? Or would it only be an infringement if they were not allowed to speak their opinions?
Suppose that in 20 years, atheists are in the majority, and they don’t want to serve Christians in business transactions. Would it be an infringement on the rights of these atheists to demand that they serve people independent of religious affiliation?
doctor(logic),
You have sunk to a new low in argumentation here, or whatever you want to call it:
No evidence, no reason for what you’ve stated, nothing.
Sure, I also failed to pull out quotes from Dawkins and Harris, but they are at least well-known as crusaders against religion. Both their names are closely associated with calls for an end to all religion. Whatever else Bush may known for, crusading against atheism would not be the first thing that comes to most people’s minds.
I have a comment policy with which I am sure you are well aware, of no political discussion. If you want to bring forth some evidence that Bush wants to deny equal legal rights to atheists, please feel free to do so; I’ll bend the policy that much for one comment perhaps. But you’d better make it good: no equating his stand on stem-cell research, or abortion, or same-sex unions with attacks on atheism itself. You know better than that, I hope.
In the meantime, though, I’m going to simply call you out on this mean-spirited and really surprisingly weak tactic you’ve just employed.
It’s getting late; I’ll take a look at the rest of your comment in the morning.
Tom,
Sorry, I thought this exchange was
well-known…
I was unaware of that, doctor(logic). I certainly disagree with the position stated there, and I’m pretty surprised he spoke it to that extent, or was reported to at any rate. Thank you for clarifying.
So I accept that you had that information and were speaking from that basis. But you might want to check your information. This rebuttal of that story comes from a free-thinkers website. The links at the very bottom show changes in Rob Sherman’s story over a period of time.
Of course they were discrimination against non-whites. How could they not have been? Any man of any race should be free to marry any woman of any race, and it was wrong they were prevented from doing so.
If you’re going to talk about homosexuals marrying without taking part in the act, that rather changes the whole course of the discussion, doesn’t it? I was assuming they went together.
The question is rather, “how is society harmed if society decides the natural parent-natural child family is completely optional?” Rampant divorce has already revealed part of that answer. Gay “marriage,” if approved is a societal statement that this institution of family, generative, focused on building a next generation, is optional; set aside in favor of unions just for the sake of “love.” “Love” is insufficient; a sense of building the future is also inherent in marriage. This is severely weakened in gay “marriage.”
No, I would not say that. The civil right that’s affected in the case of gay activism is in the First Amendment: religious and speech rights.
Exactly what is it that you are drawing an analogy to? The civil right at risk for Christians in this dispute is this: the right to practice our historic religion and to speak its teachings.
If Christians refuse to serve gays on account of the gays’ identity as gays, that is wrong. If Christians are forced to violate their own historic beliefs, providing a service that in itself (apart from the identity of the recipients) is sinful according to our historic beliefs, that too is wrong. I don’t see any analogy to that in the example you just gave.
Tom,
Thanks for the link about the Bush quote. It looks like no one can confirm Sherman’s quotation of Bush, but, instead of denying the statement or withholding comment, the Bush team just stated that they did not support atheism.
But the Jacoby piece says there’s no discrimination against gays because they can marry people of the opposite sex. That’s precisely analogous to saying there’s no racial discrimination in anti-miscegenation laws because both sides of an interracial couple have the right to marry a person of the same race.
Maybe this was not the focus of the OP. But suppose that there were a Prop 9 that re-instated anti-miscegenation laws. If a commercial was made in which the anti-miscegenation proponents of Prop 9 were depicted breaking into an interracial couple’s home and torching their marriage license, would that be bigotry against the anti-miscegenation proponents?
No, that’s not what I am saying.
What I am saying is that there will still be gay couples, they will still have sex, and they will still adopt children. But you are not banning these things. You are banning their marriage. You are banning their right to automatically pass property on to their families, to visit a spouse in hospital, or make decisions for a spouse who is incapacitated, or obtain a couple of thousand benefits that automatically come to spouses.
In the previous comment you said that it’s not about killers but killing. Now you’re suggesting it’s not about killing but killers.
Maybe I should put it this way. What do you think will happen if gays have the right to marry? Obviously, there will be more gay marriages, but will there be more gay couples, or more homosexual sex? Will there be more gays?
There will not be more gays. (Sexual morphology, identity and orientation are fixed at birth.)
Is society better or worse for allowing divorce?
First of all, it is optional, even if gays are not allowed to marry. Second, gay couples are families. Just like any childless couple is a family.
Compare two societies. In one, there are gay couples, but they lack rights of straight couples. In the other, there are an equal number of gay couples, but they get rights befitting a family structure. Why is the first better than the second?
Straight families that want kids are not going to stop wanting them because gay couples can marry. Straight people are not going to become gay because gay couples can marry. So I don’t see what this has to do with building the next generation, and it certainly does not affect your right to build your own family as you see fit.
You are taking away gay rights because giving them rights is symbolic?
No, it isn’t. Why do you think all (or even most) gay couples don’t care about building the future?
For that matter, why do you think all (or even most) childless couples don’t care about building the future?
How about all the heterosexual couples that breed without due diligence? Who have kids because they forgot to use (or had no access to) birth control? Or who just wing it, and don’t pick up any books on the science of parenting? Do they care about the future? They’re doing a lot more damage than gay couples are.
But you can still say it is wrong for gays to marry, just as racists can say that it is wrong for whites to marry non-whites. As long as the speech isn’t hate speech (which is theoretically not a problem for Christians), your 1st Amendment rights aren’t violated. You don’t have to let gays into your churches nor sanctify their marriages. But if you run a public business or take government money, you can’t discriminate.
If your free speech rights are violated by gay marriage laws, then the racist’s free speech rights are violated by racial equality laws. I don’t see any distinction.
We live in a liberal democratic society. In public contexts, you are free to give your opinion, but you can’t withhold transactions. In private contexts, you are free to give your opinion and withhold transactions. This is what the civil rights movement was about.
doctor(logic),
Sorry, but this is inaccurate:
Anti-miscegenation laws denies some persons the right to marry whom they chose. Bans on gay unions do not deny anyone the right to marry. They deny the doubtful privilege of re-defining what marriage actually means. Gays can marry. They just can’t re-define marriage to mean something other tha what it means. Which means they can’t “marry” the same sex.
Probably–if it so severely misrepresented their actual behavior and added so much to the inflammatoriness of the debate.
Yes. Undeniably. The more a social behavior is supported by society, the more it occurs.
And I thought you were a scientist. Where’d you get that from?????
“[Jesus] said to them, ‘Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so;'” i.e., that was never the intent. It is a necessary evil, because marriages once entered into do not always last. Marriage itself is a good, and therefore worth that risk. Gay “marriage” is not.
I think there is a determined push by the gay rights activists to encourage children and teens to experiment with same-sex physical intimacy. Gay “marriage” helps to endorse this. Straight people will become gay because of this, and immorality will increase. Of course there is also the sheer fact that same-sex intimacy is immoral on its own, for reasons I am convinced of but I know you do not accept.
Why do I think gay couples don’t care about building the future? The fact is, the institution of gay “marriage” is not by its nature a future-building institution, as straight marriage is.
There are different reasons for being childless, some medical and tragic, some purely selfish, and many in between. But the institution of straight marriage is a future-building institution, regardless of some individuals’ attitudes or experiences.
In Canada, England, and Sweden, and elsewhere, Biblical teaching against homosexuality has been prosecuted as hate speech. Free speech is very much at risk there, and is likely at some point also to be in the United States if trends continue.
Tom,
The two cases are virtually identical. I’m sure those opposing interracial marriage would have (or could have) said exactly the same thing. They would have said proper marriage is between people of the same race, and anything else is redefining marriage. They would have said that there were different races for a reason, and a world where race has disappeared is wrong.
Wow!
Again, wow!
Do you have any evidence for this? I think it’s completely wrong.
Straight people do not turn gay or vice versa. There are bisexuals who engage in both, but that’s not the same thing. If you’re straight, there’s no way someone can entice you to be gay, and vice versa.
The people who claim to be converted to being gay were simply gay or bisexual to begin with, but because there’s so much stigma associated with being gay, they want to lay the “blame” for their behavior elsewhere.
This is not what I expected you to say. I think there are a lot of people who fear gays because they think homosexuality is some sort of transmissable cooties.
Now, let’s suppose your claim that being immersed in a culture would result in a change in sexual orientation. If that were true, the number of gays would be falling. There are approximately 900% more straights than gays, so the current would lead the other way. Gay people would be defecting to the straights at a rate of 9:1. We could theorize that the system is in equilibrium, but that would mean that the number of gays becoming straight equals the numbers of straights becoming gay. But the actual number of gay people spontaneously becoming straight is approximately zero (despite the stigma of being gay). So, knowing nothing more than casual background information, we would conclude that one’s sexual orientation is effectively fixed by puberty.
But it turns out that the scientific evidence goes further than this. There are regions in the limbic part of the brain that control sexual dimension. Sexual identity is whether you feel like a man or woman, and sexual orientation is whether you are attracted to the opposite sex or the same sex. It turns out that the structure of this brain region is correlated with the two sexual dimensions. Scientific controls tell us that these regions do not change, even if the subject radically changed their hormone levels, either through menopause or castration. We also know the hormone pathways that control sexual morphology and brain development. What we find is that sexual morphology, identity and orientation are independent dimensions, and they’re all fixed at birth. The only reason that orientation and identity appear to blossom at puberty is that testosterone levels peak only three times in life: fetal, neonatal and puberty. The wiring is already fixed at birth, and, like a time bomb, sexual identity and orientation are just waiting for the right hormones to come along.
I did not know this scientific evidence until very recently. I always assumed that a gay gene was like a gene for music, and that sexual orientation depended on environment. But I was wrong. It seems there is overwhelming evidence that homosexuality is a natural hardware variation. The only cases where environment is going to make much difference are where the subject is bisexual and taboos keep the subject from trying the same sex. However, this is a small subset of the LGBT population, and it’s not the case that environment is making them bisexual. They were bisexual to begin with.
I’ll try to find the references for the science behind this, but the bottom line is that straights aren’t being made gay. They were gay to start with and are coming out.
I asked why do you think that X. You replied because it is a fact that X. Which really means you think that X because you think that X. What I was looking for were reasons why you think that X.