Refuting Christianity Today
Sunday, February 29, 2004
*NOTE: Christianity
Today offers the following disclaimer: “Viewpoints published in
‘Speaking Out’ do not necessarily represent those of Christianity Today.
The conservative magazine Christianity Today has
published an article entitled “Speaking
Out: Why Gay Marriage Would Be Harmful” by authors Robert Benne and
Gerald McDermott, professors at Roanoke College. In it, the authors
methodically lay out their reasoning why gay marriage should not be
legalized in this country, and to their credit, they largely leave religious
considerations and straw-man arguments out of their assertions. This, I
think, makes their arguments worthy of reading and consideration, and worthy
of an honest attempt to refute with the same care, honesty and dignity that
they demonstrate in their article. I will attempt to do just that.
Messrs. Benne and McDermott distill their arguments to
three concise points: that “gay marriage would be 1) bad for marriage, 2)
bad for children, and 3) bad for society.” As they take these points one at
a time, so shall I:
1. “The first casualty of the acceptance of gay marriage would be the
very definition of marriage itself.”
Here, the argument begins as follows: “For thousands of
years and in every Western society marriage has meant the life-long union of
a man and a woman. Such a statement about marriage is what philosophers
call an analytic proposition. The concept of marriage necessarily includes
the idea of a man and a woman committing themselves to each other.”
The whole problem with this line of defense is that it
is widely recognized as “circular logic”. Define the term, then use the
definition that you offered to defend the concept of the term. This of
course gets us nowhere.
But if we’re going to attempt to define marriage, let’s
talk about who really is defining marriage and by what criteria. All of the
current arguments center on the states and the federal definition of
marriage – the legal definition. While philosophers are useful in these
matters, they are by no means binding. So, let’s keep ourselves to the
specific arguments at hand.
Before 1996, with the passage of the Defense of
Marriage Act (DOMA), there was only a broad understanding of marriage on the
federal level. The specifics of who could and could not marry was (and
still is) left to the individual states. Further, before the 18th
century, states did not get involved with determining who was married to
whom – it was strictly a religious activity. However problems arose when
laws were enacted outlining what husbands and wives were and were not
entitled to, and it soon became necessary to determine who could legally
claim to be married to whom. It was at this time in the late 1700’s that
some states began the initial steps of registering marriages, and to
determine who could actually be married. According to Cynthia Crossen of
The Wall Street Journal, this marked the government’s first act of
granting permission to marry.
However even then, registration was not a requirement
in order for a marriage to be valid. These so-called common-law marriages
were the norm, particularly on the frontier where preachers and civil
servants weren’t readily accessible. Every genealogist today understands
the difficulty in obtaining civil marriage records before the middle of the
19th century. For many parts of the country, common-law
marriages had legal standing right up through the early part of the 20th
century, and in a few states, even to this very day.
When states finally got into the act of deciding who could marry who,
several restrictions were introduced into the definition of marriage, and
the most disturbing of these restrictions were racial ones. These
racial restrictions were often cited on religious and moral grounds, and
varied from state to state. Today, those racial restrictions no longer
exist. The legislatures (and indeed sometimes the courts when the
states refused to act) redefined who was allowed to marry who by dropping
the racial restrictions.
Messrs. Benne and McDermott assert that “scrambling the
definition of marriage will be a shock to our fundamental understanding of
human social relations and institutions.” Indeed, racially-mixed marriages
were very shocking on these very same levels, and are still not widely
accepted in some circles of society. However, shock alone is not a good
reason for prohibiting marriage by a class of people.
The potentially thorniest issue Messrs. Benne and
McDermott bring up, is the famed promiscuity of homosexual men. They quote
Andrew Sullivan, who contended, “there is more likely to be a greater
understanding of the need for extramarital outlets between two men than
between a man and a woman.” And they quote Troy Perry of the Metropolitan
Community Church in Dallas who said, “Because we can’t marry, we have people
with widely varying opinions as to what that (fidelity) means. Some would
say that committed couples could have multiple sexual partners as long as
there’s no deception.”
I confess a very strong personal sympathy with Messrs.
Benne and McDermott when it comes to fidelity. Any couple going into a
marriage with attitudes like those expressed by Sullivan and Perry is not
going in with a mature relationship. Indeed, such marriages are very likely
to be very unstable, much like the estimated fifty-percent of heterosexual
marriages which currently end in divorce. Rick Hampton and Karen S Peterson
of
USA Today cite specific studies that show that anywhere from 25% to 60%
of all heterosexual men had at least one extramarital affair sometime in
their life. With statistics like these, infidelity is by no means a
homosexual problem, it is a societal one. Conservatives are right:
infidelity undermines the stability of families and society as a whole, and
is catastrophic for children.
But let's say for the sake of argument, if homosexuals as a group were more inclined– even
if they were much more inclined – towards infidelity, should that
mean that every faithful gay couple should be denied marriage because others
are inclined to behave badly? With statistics showing many heterosexuals
behave badly as well, it seems to be a strange form of singling-out. Even
if more homosexuals per capita behave badly than heterosexuals, it is
still unfair to deny faithful homosexuals the right to marry, just as
it would be unfair to deny faithful heterosexuals the right to marry.
Unfortunately, I know of no reliable
fidelity-inclination test that can be applied at the registrar’s office. If
one exists, I’d be all for using it. If the crux of Messrs. Benne and
McDermott argument is that their side is better behaved than our side, they
will need to come up with a different argument that does not include a
double standard.
Messrs. Benne and McDermott then go on to quote a few
exceptionally radical professors on gay marriage being the first step
towards legalizing polyamory, a tactic that we laymen might recognize as a
“red herring”. This is the familiar slippery-slope argument, although to
their credit they shunned the more outrageous specters of bestiality,
incest, and pedophilia. But as it is a simple line to draw against other
species, relatives, and the and the capacity to consent, it’s also just as
easy to limit the quantity of partners without discriminating against a
class of people. If retailers can enforce limited quantities for sale items
without tramping on anybody’s right to make a purchase, we can do the same
here with marriage. It’s just not that difficult.
2. “Gay marriage would be bad for children.”
Messrs. Benne and McDermott claim that research shows
that “children raised by homosexuals were more dissatisfied with their own
gender, suffer a greater rate of molestation within the family, and have
homosexual experiences more often.”
This is the most damning spectacle that opponents of
gay marriage conjure. If true, it would be a frightening and dangerous
spectacle indeed. It is however the “blood libel” against the gay
community. Messrs. Benne and McDermott do not actually offer any supporting
research to support their claims. Indeed, a number of studies dispute all
of these claims, especially the claim to greater molestation (see “Kurt
Freund & Robin Watson, 1989 and 1992; also Carole Jenny, Tom Roesler, &
Kimberly Poyer, 1994). The data simply does not support the outrageous
charges made against homosexual couples raising children, or homosexuals in
general. In fact, Freund & Watson demonstrated that heterosexual man are
slightly more inclined to molest underage girls than homosexual men are
inclined to
molest boys.
It is a terrible and undeniable truth that horrible
things happen to children in many families. Crime statistics show that
significant numbers of step-daughters are raped by their step-fathers.
There is however no proposal to prohibit remarriage of heterosexual couples
where children are involved. Such a proposition would be ludicrous. We
cannot deny the majority of good and decent people the right to remarry
because a tiny minority uses that opportunity to commit crimes against
children. By the same token, there is no reason to deny the vast majority
of gay couples the right to marry based on what a very small minority may or
may not do.
Messrs. Benne and McDermott go on to claim that gay
marriage will “encourage teens who are unsure of their sexuality to embrace
a lifestyle that suffers from high rates of suicide, depression, HIV, drug
abuse, STD’s and other pathogens.” This claim ignores the effects of
marginalization on these rates of pathologies. Other marginalized
groups, such as African-Americans, also
suffer very high rates for many of these problems, and they suffer not
because they’re gay, but because they’re marginalized. It’s the
marginalization (I hate using the word oppression – its too
politically-charged to be useful anymore) which drives men and women to
expressions of despair and reckless behavior as indicated by most of these
pathologies.
On the topic of HIV and other STD’s (which the authors
threw in for good measure), they did not attempt to assess the effects of
lack of access to reliable medical information. Our current administration
is complicit in this problem. For example, at the start of the Bush
Administration, the Centers for Disease Control removed all information from
their website about condom usage and protection against HIV and other STD’s,
and this information remains missing to this very day. And the
Republican-controlled Congress has sharply cut and sometimes eliminated
educational programs which do not meet the litmus test of advocating
abstinence to the exclusion of all other solid medical information, and
they’ve not only done this domestically, but have attempted to do this on
the international stage as well.
Messrs. Benne and McDermott end this point by saying,
“finally, acceptance of gay marriage will strengthen the notion that
marriage is primarily about adult yearnings for intimacy and is not
essentially connected to raising children.” They offer no evidence that
this is true of all, or even a majority of gay couples. Given the number of
gay couples that are working hard to adopt children to raise as their own,
it cannot be entirely true.
But let’s assume that it is true. It has never been
the purpose of the state to determine why a couple wishes to be
married, but whether. Elderly couples marry, so do infertile
couples. Couples who for various moral, economic, and even trivial reasons
take steps to ensure that they will not have children are also permitted to
marry.
While raising children may be a moral argument
for the purpose of marriage, the states have never weighed in on the “essentiality”
of raising children for a marriage. The closest that the states have come
to this position is the little-used grounds for annulment which can be
claimed if one spouse is infertile and the other spouse was deceived on that
fact at the time of the wedding. But even there, this is a legal claim that
is made after the wedding takes place. It has never been something which
must be demonstrated in order to obtain recognition of marriage, at least
not in the civil sphere.
Messrs. Benne and McDermott close by saying, “Children
will be hurt by those who will too easily bail out of a marriage because it
is not ‘fulfilling’ to them.” I would have to agree with them
wholeheartedly. Marriage should not be seen a cause for personal
fulfillment, and I too believe that many couples fall into this trap. When
children are involved, the whole equation must change, yet far too often it
doesn’t. But while this may be an argument for prohibiting immature and
selfish people from marrying (if such a prohibition could be enforced), it
is not an argument for prohibiting gay people from marrying.
3. "Gay marriage would be bad for society."
This
argument rests on two rather thin political problems. The first one is
this: “The effects we have described above will have strong repercussions on
a society that is already having trouble maintaining wholesome stability in
marriage and family life. If marriage and families are the foundation for a
healthy society, introducing more uncertainty and instability in them will
be bad for society.”
I know of no surveys on this subject, but I would wager
a good fortune that a principle reason gays feel so passionate about the
subject of gay marriage is that they too believe that marriage and families
are the foundation for a healthy society. It’s what we all want, deep
down. The men and women you see on CNN lined up at City Hall in San
Francisco have been dreaming their entire lives of the day when they could
join the mainstream, to live together as a family, and to contribute towards
the stability of society.
For it is true what conservatives say: marriage
strengthens the family, it strengthens the couple, and it does that because
marriage is a bond that is widely recognized as uniting that couple together
as one. When you’re married, you’re no longer two individuals, you’re a
couple, and married couples are naturally compelled to work harder to make
it work. When you’re merely cohabitating, you don’t have to work as hard.
It’s as easy to leave as renting a U-Haul, and that is an inherently
uncertain and unstable situation.
This is that very “uncertainty and instability” that
Messrs. Benne and McDermott would have us avoid. On this point, they offer
an excellent argument against cohabitation, but a poor argument against gay
marriage. Yet today, cohabitation is the only option available to gay men
and women. Let gay men and women marry, and they’ll take care of the
uncertainty themselves.
Their last supporting argument that gay marriage would
be bad for society goes like this: “We believe that gay marriage can only be
imposed by activist judges, not by the democratic will of the people. The
vast majority of people define marriage as the life-long union of a man and
a woman. They will strongly resist definition.”
We can quibble over what “vast majority” means, but I’m
willing to concede that many scientific surveys show that varying margins of
a majority (slim to wide, depending on how the polls were worded) oppose gay
marriage. Similar majorities opposed racially-mixed marriages some thirty
years ago. Times change, and so do attitudes. There are still those who
disapprove of racially-mixed marriages, but those numbers have declined
rapidly. But they didn’t start declining until “activist judges” struck
down various state laws restricting such marriages when legislatures failed
to act.
If we had waited until legislatures got around to
changing the laws in many of these states, justice for many couples would
have been delayed at least another generation. And if we wait until the
general public ceases to “strongly resist definition” for mixed-racial
marriages, couples in a few parts of the country would still be waiting.
This generation of gay men and women is no longer
willing to wait. |
