Who Cares?

There are certain issues that do not receive nearly the adequate amount of attention or level of impassioned debate in our culture. Among the issues taken far too lightly are foreign policy, energy policy, and health care. There are other issues, however, which receive far too much attention when weighed against their actual import.

These other issues, which become obsessions for many, are gun rights, abortion, and gay marriage.

I understand the importance of gun rights (it is, after all, the 2nd amendment to the constitution) and I understand the intense emotion surrounding abortion (after all, if you take a certain view of what life is, abortion is murder, pure and simple), but these issues are often used as political bludgeons, the "solutions" to which are beyond the horizon; they simply serve as campaign fodder every few years.

Gay marriage is in this vein. People who are passionate about gay marriage one way or another suffer from a tunnel vision that utterly distorts the larger importance of this issue. Put simply, who cares? Why do we need to be concerned with 2 men or 2 women getting married?

The first justification for being passionately anti-gay marriage is biblical. And that's fine. If you take a literal reading of the Old and New Testaments, and if you think gay marriage is supremely important, you are well within your rights to refuse to perform marriages for gays in your private church.

But that should have absolutely nothing to do with civil statutes, with the law of the land. The dictates of religion obviously inform some of our laws (e.g., no killing), but these laws would be obvious even without religion, as such. Even god-hating bohemians require safe streets.

The problem with using the Bible to "guide" the ban on gay marriage as it "guides" the bans on theft and murder is that there is NO non-biblical reason to discriminate against gays. As noted above, there ARE non-biblical reasons to ban murder and theft. No so for gay rights.

If any church in this country thinks the Bible should explicitly and directly be reflected in our civil statutes, they should move to 15th century England. Or at least start paying taxes.

So, religion is out. That leaves civil reasons. There are certain moral precepts which are legislated by civil authorities, despite the common canard that it's impossible to "legislate morality".

For example, a man can only have one wife at a time. That is a restriction on the liberty of polygamists in the interest of broader order, a reasonable sacrifice of individual liberty in the interest of the whole if their ever was one.

Allowing two men to marry each other would not upset that precept of monogamy, long accepted throughout most cultures on earth, a staggeringly consistent practice across space and time and cultures. Marriage would still be between just 2 people. Laws regarding the minutiae of taxation, inheritance, divorce proceedings and so forth would not have to be changed at all.

So there really is no purely civic rationale for preventing two adult men or women from marrying in a civil ceremony (or in a friendly church, if one can be found). The only remaining rationale, therefore is social.

This is a familiar beast, this ritualized and normalized and "scientific" and "natural" order in even the most civilized countries where certain people are treated as second-class citizens with the most casual moral certitude.

"Scientific" and "psychological" constructs of gays have been discarded just as "scientific" and "eugenic" constructs of blacks were discarded. The only "reason" remaining for their insult is the unfortunate truth that society as a whole has contempt, if not hatred, for them.

Alot of people, especially men, hate gay people. And if they don't hate them, they feel like a "good" white southerner would have felt between 1776 and 1965: "I don't mind the blacks...they're not bad folks....I just wish they wouldn't be so loud about everything".

Dignity, of course, is just about the only thing worth being loud about, and the critical mass of Americans has yet to see the gay rights issues through that prism, seeing it instead as gays seeking "special" dispensations, akin to feeling that the right to vote for blacks 40 years ago was some sort of gift granted by a benevolent dictator.

I acknowledge my own discomfort with many aspects of the gay lifestyle. To be perfectly honest, the idea of two men being sexually intimate with each other turns my stomach. It does. And I have seen many displays of the "homosexual lifestyle", especially on college campuses, where "free speech", "gay rights", and utterly inappropriate sexually explicit material in public were blurred together in a shameless erection of straw men (pun intended).

But my own hang-ups have nothing to do with whether gay men should enjoy the same rights I do. Of course they should.

Freedom is not about respecting the rights of others to do things that you approve of; people have that "freedom" in North Korea. Freedom is about the charity and the discipline to accept all the beautiful and confusing and absorbing and distasteful things that make up human beings and to accept that each individual is free to be exactly what he or she was born to be unless and until he or she threatens the life or property of another.

It's as simple as that. You don't have to like it. But you must defend it.