Looking At Arguments Against Same-Sex Marriage

As you may know the California Supreme Court recently spent 3.5 hours listening to arguments on the issue of whether the state law defining marriage as the union of man and a woman is constitutional. This has the potential to be the biggest domestic issues verdict since 1948 when the California court overturned the state's miscegenation law in Perez v Sharp(for those of you suffering from a California public high school education, miscegenation comes from Latin meaning "to mix race" or for a more concrete definition interracial marriage). A ruling is due by June of this year. I have to tell you, after looking at arguments on both sides I have come down on the side that says the marriages should be allowed. This has nothing to do with being gay. As with many other issues I held that separate from the fact-finding and information processing activities. The issue for me comes down on the side of viewing it as a civil matter rather than a religious one. Personally, I think that the government should get out of the marriage business altogether and simply issue certificates of legal partnership. If particular religions wish to have marriages they can have a ceremony but these would have no legal legitimacy, simply being a religious ceremony. Thus the government would have no say whatsoever on whether or not a religion had to perform same-sex marriages and those that were gay friendly would be allowed to do so. What mattered in the eyes of the government for tax and legal purposes would be the certificate of legal partnership (call them civil unions if you wish).

OK, I know this is far too radical for most people to contend with (but thus far I have not heard of any coercive arguments against it), so let's look at the issue of marriage. The issue as it appears to me depends on the how you answer the question "What is the purpose of marriage?" For the moment I am going to remove the religious-based responses, those will be dealt with in a subsequent post. Once we leave the realm of religious responses the most common I have encountered are:

1. Marriage is between one man and one woman.
   
2. Same-sex marriage would threaten the institution of marriage.
   
3. Marriage is for procreation.
   
4. Same-sex relationships are detrimental to children.
   
5. Same-sex marriage would lead us to polygamy, incest, bestiality, etc.
   
6. Granting same-sex marriage creates a special right and you conservatives are against making more of those.
   

Each point deserves its own post but truth be told I'm too lazy to type them and I don't think you want to see all the clutter in the blog so I will try to my utmost to condense my responses to each.

1. This one is easy (remember, no religion as this is strictly a civil matter). Just who says that marriage is between one man and one woman only? Allowing same-sex marriage does not preclude one man/one woman, it just broadens the set of possible marriage combinations. Well, you might say, we needed to draw the line somewhere but I ask you "Why there?" Who gets to say where the line is drawn? Why, the majority you might respond. Be careful of going there especially in California because the polls were 2-1 against allowing interracial marriage when it was struck down. You can read the anti-miscegenation ruling here (and if you do pay close attention to Judge Traynor's opinion). Simply saying that marriage is between one man and one woman gets too close to creating a circular argument to be of much effect.
   
   
2. Just about as easy as the first one. First, how does allowing people to marry threaten marriage? If marriage is such a wonderful institution that carries with it beneficial societal and health benefits, why not encourage it? If we are honest, heterosexuals haven't been the greatest protectors of their ideal of marriage. If nothing else (and there is much more) think of the divorces that would not happen if gay people were allowed to enter into gay marriage rather than a sham heterosexual marriage that can end only in traumatic divorce. And isn't it possible that the other arguments of why marriage is great (such as the domestication effect on promiscuity) could apply at least in part to a male-male or female-female marriage? If you want to protect the institution of heterosexual marriage make divorce almost impossible to exist and make adultery punishable by death.
   
   
3. Oh please. If this were true then lets not allow marriage to those who cannot regardless of the reason, instant divorce to those who have procedures that disallow the creation of children, and make it law that all marriage must produce at least one child within the first three years of marriage else the union in delcared null and void. And who says that children cannot be produced within a same-sex union? A nice gay couple could donate sperm to a nice lesbian couple and voila, children! OK, bit of a stretch but you get the idea.
   
   
4. The literature on this one is at best mixed. The fact is, many gay couples raise children, adopted and occasionally their own from failed attempts at heterosexual marriages and what the literature does seem to indicate is difference is in the quality of the experience, not the sexual identity of the parents. Anecdotally, what seems to be detrimental is that narrow-minded parents raise narrow-minded children who seem to think it is OK to bully and harass children whose parents are gay. Now whose problem is this?
   
   
5. Ah, the famous slippery-slope argument. Lets be frank, allowing marriage at all could be the beginning of the "slippery slope" but that, like this argument against, is a bit silly. The argument is one used to generate fear, but unlike say the argument against allowing a mother to marry her son (which could be made on genetic grounds), allowing two men or two women to marry does not carry those potentially harmful outcomes and unlike polygamy a man-man or woman-woman union would not muddy the waters of rights and responsibilities of those entering the marriage contract. In the words of another writer: If we allowed Terri Schaivo to have two husbands and they disagreed on her care, then who gets the final word? This is exactly the sort of question marriage exists to answer. Polygamy not only wouldn't answer it, it would make it unanswerable. Such issues would not exist within a same-sex marriage.
   
   
6. And now a big one for conservatives like myself, but I don't see the problem that some of my conservative brothers and sisters do. If 95% of the country is already allowed the right to marry (I am assuming 5% of the population is gay because I am not quite convinced of the statistics pointing to the usual 10%), then how is extending that right to the other 5% creating a "special right"? Polygamous heterosexual can still marry a person of a sex they desire, they just have to pick one. The only marriage homosexuals can currently enter into are those that would be shams, lies, and deceitful from the beginning. By not allowing gay men and women to marry the only possible marriage union would be mendacious and fraudulent. so please tell me how this allowance is a "special" right.
   

Do you want to really know the real reasons people are against same-sex marriage? Here it is:

Fear. For some reason many straight people are afraid of "the different" or "the other".

Religious views. Sadly, many people confuse religion with civil law. Granted, many statutes are based on our religious beliefs (and they are wonderful) but some were misguided (prohibitions against interracial marriage or even pro-slavery stands were made on the grounds of some religious interpretation). We must be very careful on how religion carries over into the public square.

In my opinion the biggest is what I call the "ick factor". Rather than thinking of people who are gay, many in our society really view us in terms of how we practice sex (the one difference seems to be how straight men view lesbian sexual practice, something I simply don't understand). Many straight men just can't seem to past the sexual acts of gay people. Sorry, but for those of us on this side of the fence we don't quite understand what you get out of your practices either.