Anti-Gay Marriage = Anti-Gay

This Sunday's NY Times Magazine has an interesting profile on the anti-gay marriage movement among conservative Christians. Unfortunately the article, written by author Russell Shorto, begins with the non-revelation that anti-gay marriage Christians are actually opposed not only to gay marriage, but to homosexuality itself. But Shorto goes well beyond this apparant non-issue to profile up close some of those who are at work in the anti-gay marriage movement, and to explain exactly how they are using the issue of gay marriage to battle the relative acceptance of homosexuality in our broader society. In doing so, the reader is confronted with a litany of unfounded assertions and beliefs regarding homosexuality and gay marriage, most of which reflect a belief in the sacredness of the ideal "traditional" marriage.

From one of the activits portrayed in the article:

''The gay activists are trying to redefine what marriage has been basically since the beginning of time and on every continent,'' she said. ''My concern is for the children -- for the future.''

At the heart of conservative Christians' opposition to gay marriage is this belief that our version of marraige is essentially an unchanging institution, created and ordained by God as the proper means of union between men and women and the only means by which humanity should propogate. This betrays an unfortunate ignorance of the vast and myriad ways that all cultures have engaged in marriage between men and women...and men and men, and women and women.

Another belief is that the growing accpetance of homosexuality has had negative practical consequences on our society:

''The Hebrew words for male and female are actually the words for the male and female genital parts,'' he told me. ''The male is the piercer; the female is the pierced. That is the way God designed it. It's unfortunate that homosexuals have taken the moniker 'gay,' because their lifestyle and its consequences are anything but. Look what has happened in the decades since the sexual revolution and acceptance of the gay lifestyle as normal. Viruses have mutated. S.T.D.'s have spread. It shows that when we try to change the natural course of things, what comes out of that is not joy or gayness.''

This is of course is the argument that homosexuality is not "natural", as God did not design men to be with men and women to be with women, and that to go against such design is to invite disastrous consequences. Although this is the most basic argument in the entire debate, it's also the least defensible in that man has spent most of the last 10,000 years trying to do things that are "unnatural" so he doesn't starve, or freeze, or die young.

The anti-gay activitsts profiled in the article go on to trot out some of the other common arguments against gay marriage and homosexuality-the threat to society of marriage is undremined, the belief that gay marriage will lead to more "deviant" practices such as polyamory, the belief that children need a male and female parent. But all of these arguments are simpy an effort to lend some credence to the fact that anti-gay conservatives are opposed to homosexuality itself, that many Christians regard it as sinful, and they are willing to use social pressure and the power of the state not only to prevent the legitimation of gay marriage, but also to turn back the clock and make gay relationships illegal again.

As the article points out, this struggle over gay marriage is simply part of a larger cultural struggle, part of which is the effort to define marriage for gays and heterosexuals alike. Stephanie Coontz discusses this in her new book "Marriage, A History" . Listening to her on NPR the other day, I got to hear her talk about how much marriage has evolved in America alone in the last two hundred years, and how to a great extent the conservatives who are currently battling against gay marriage are harkening back to a concept of marriage that did not exist until quite recently, and only as a result of the liberalization of the ideal of marriage. She discussed how only in the last century did the ideal of marriage become what we regard it as today, as a faithful union of love between two people who have chosen each other. But in my opinion the more interesting point she made was that form of marriage was the end-product of centuries of liberalizing marriage, such that those who got married could marry the person of their choice, and could choose to marry for love instead of for other reasons. Coontz stated that in fact conservatives today enjoy an ideal of marriage made possible by their liberalizing and progressive ancestors, an ideal that has changed to the degree that it's hard to see how it can not encompass gay marriage as well.

I, like some other liberals, also believe that the gay marriage debate is part of a larger cultural shift. I believe that such a shift is inevitable, and that it favors liberalization of the ideal of marriage to extend to gays, and for greater personal freedom in general. Frankly I think conservatives have already lost, just as their predecessors lost the battle over civil rights and the battle over slavery. But the inevitability of this change does not mean that it will come without hard work on the part of gay activists and their liberal allies; a hard fight for gay marriage could mean near universal gay marriage in 50 years, instead of a hundred or more.