Gays and the Meaning of Marriage

 

Craig Payne

Craig Payne teaches at a community college in southeastern Iowa.

      Sometimes you happen to overhear the most interesting conversations in restaurants. Like this one:

D: I don’t understand your problem with this. Why are you opposed to giving gays the right to get married? Wouldn’t that promote stability in our society?

R: Who said I’m opposed to gays getting married? It doesn’t matter to me one way or the other. However, your question is confusing. Don’t gays already have the right to get married? I’ve even known gays who were married.

D: Are you kidding? What planet have you been living on? Haven’t you seen the news lately, or read a paper? Gays are fighting for the right to get married, but they’re getting all kinds of opposition from people like you.

R: Decent, kind, sensible people, you mean?

D: That’s not exactly what I had in mind.

R: Anyway, I’m still confused. I thought gays already had the right to get married. I’ve known men, for example, who were married and even had children with their wives, but then left their wives for another man. The same with gay females who left their husbands for other women. So can’t gays already get married?

D: I hope you’re just pretending to be that stupid. Gays do not want just the right to some charade of a heterosexual marriage. What they want is the right to marry each other. Same-sex unions, in other words.

R: But that’s my point. The term “heterosexual marriage” is a redundancy. What gays want is not the right to get married, a right they have always had. What they want is the right to re-define marriage, and then to force the rest of society to accept their new definition. A “same-sex union” is not a marriage.

D: Ah, you’re just being homophobic. The definition of marriage is not set in stone. Different societies have different definitions.

R: Then why stop at redefining marriage to mean the union of two men, or two women? Why not three or four men? Why not three men and one woman? Why not five men and a German Shepherd?

D: Now you’re being both ridiculous and offensive. That’s not going to happen.

R: Well, just a few years ago the concept of “gay marriage” would have been considered ridiculous, too. People would have said, “That’s not going to happen.” We’re not just going down a slippery slope—we’re stepping off a cliff.

D: Get back to my point. Different societies define marriage differently. Why can’t we change our definition of marriage to accommodate gay marriages?

R: In one respect, you are right. There are many different arrangements that are considered marriages or family unions in different societies. But the funny thing is that every single human in those arrangements comes from the union of one man and one woman. That is the relationship that is foundational to everything else. All other relationships are derivative. They are secondary, while the “one man-one woman” relationship is primary. Like Jesus said, “Have you not read that from the beginning God created them male and female?”

D: Aha! I knew it!

R: Knew what?

D: I knew you were going to drag the Bible into this conversation eventually. That’s the real problem, isn’t it? You mean-spirited Bible-thumpers just want to impose your religious beliefs on everyone else who disagrees with you.

R: I’ll ignore the hate crime you just committed (as Christians always seem to ignore personal slurs against them) and respond to the substance of your argument. You are making a common mistake. You are assuming that just because the Bible states a moral law, the moral law doesn’t apply to those who don’t accept the authority of the Bible.

D: Right. That’s not a mistake. It’s a fact.

R: No, it’s a mistake. Some laws are “natural” laws, “written in our hearts” as the Bible itself says. For example, even if the Bible said nothing about murder, murder would still be wrong, and we would know it to be wrong.

So the question is not necessarily about what our reading of the Bible tells us. The question really is this: Do same-sex marriages violate a natural law—a law already “written in our hearts”? Many think they do, and so the battle against gay marriages is not just a battle of “religious” beliefs. It is a conflict over societal definitions.

Believe it or not, this conflict is not anti-gay people, but anti-“gay marriage.” Most people intuitively recognize this, which is why they support broad-based civil rights for all, while at the same time they oppose changing the definition of marriage to accommodate same-sex unions. Those in favor of sanctioning gay marriages know they do not have society’s support, which is why they are trying to impose the adoption of gay marriages through the court system rather than through democratic processes.

D: You’re trying to make opposition to gay marriage sound rational, but I still think it’s just homophobia. But you’re not going to let me have the last word, are you?

R: No.     Ω

“I have wondered at times what the Ten Commandments would have looked like if Moses had run them through the U.S. Congress.”—Ronald Reagan