First of all I have to say this was a very written and thought out post.
I completely agree with your equating marriage as social acceptance.
I guess in the end my opposition to accepting gay marriage comes to the fact that I see all homosexual activity as morally wrong. Much like I see all sex outside of a traditional marriage as wrong. I can be tolerant of homosexual couples-but I doubt I can ever accept that kind of relationship. It is simply wrong. I see accepting gay marriage as damage to the morality of our society.
There is also the concern about where curtailing Freedom of Religion meets with all of this.
The final thing I have to say about the anger over the involvement of LDS church in the Proposition 8 campaign- they were one of many churches involved. Where is the anger and backlash towards Baptists? Catholics? etc?
And this is what I fundamentally don't understand. You say that homosexuality, and any sex outside of marriage, is wrong. Why? You give no criteria, you simply state that it is. Exactly *how* is accepting gay marriage "damaging to the morality of our society"?
Of course, I have heard responses to this question from those who oppose gay marriage, but I don't find any of them satisfactory.
1) There is first the notion that sanctioning homosexual relationships will cause/encourage others to become homosexuals. I think that, just perhaps, the true absurdity of this view is beginning to become apparent to Americans at large, although I do know people who believe this. The fact is that sexual orientation is never a conscious choice. That there is voluminous scientific evidence for this hardly matters, because there's a basic common-sense test which proves it, and that is the fact that if you really ask yourself whether you can *decide* who you are attracted to, you have to admit that such a choice is not possible. For instance, in the States we have an ideal body type that is very skinny (almost certainly too skinny from a strict health perspective), and yet many of us find ourselves hopelessly attracted to skinny people. We cannot arbitrarily choose to be attracted to very heavy people. How much harder to choose to be attracted to members of one's own sex? Of course, we can choose to *have sex* with anyone, regardless of whether we are attracted to the person or not. Rape in prisons is sufficient example. But men who rape other men in prison aren't gay... they're raping other men because they get off on dominance and violence. A homosexual orientation is quite different. The only manner in which the societal sanctioning of gay relationships will increase the gay population is in freeing people who are too afraid to admit their orientation to express who they really are. So yes, there will be more gays *apparently*, but only because more people are admitting it.
2) There is the notion that sex must always be procreative. I take this to be patently silly. The fact is that many heterosexual couples engage in sex that is not procreative, sex that harms no one, and enhances their relationship. How exactly is sex between an infertile couple wrong? How about sex between a married man and a woman who is over 50 and can no longer have children? How about a BJ? Sex has many purposes; it is not always engaged in simply to produce children. In fact, I don't think I would be venturing out on a limb at all to say that most sex between even heterosexual married couples is not necessarily intended to produce children. The Catholic Church - which is the Church I'm most familiar with, since my mother is Catholic - itself sanctions "natural family planning." That alone is admission that sex need not always be procreative. And the fact is that procreation can never be the sole criteria for a morally correct sexual relationship... there are situations, for instance, when a woman may be forced to endure unwanted sexual advances by her husband. This goes back to the criteria presented in my earlier post. Procreation is, of course, a necessary part of human life - but it need not be a decisive criteria for sexual morality. And the fact is that for most heterosexual couples, it already isn't.
3) Homosexual acts are somehow a crime against God. For this I must ask, what evidence do we have of this? There are, of course, six passages in the Bible which supposedly comment upon homosexual acts. But there are many, many reasons why these passages themselves and the position that the Church has taken regarding their moral authority is suspect. First, the fact is that with only six passages that are *maybe* discussing homosexuality, it clearly wasn't a big concern for the Biblical authors. If it was, there would be a lot more material. They were much more concerned with the proper place of women as below men, the immorality of divorce, codes of proper diet, etc. Secondly, the ancient Hebrews had no concept of homosexuality as an unchangeable psychological condition, a part of human identity. Such an identity is a modern discovery and a modern concept. The passages discussed refer only to the bare acts themselves, and not to a romantic inclination. Thirdly, and more specifically, five of the passages probably refer either to the rape of opposing soldiers after a victorious battle, or to male sexual fertility rituals performed in pagan temples, such as the worshippers of Ba'al. It is worth noting, however, that the Greek words
malakoi and
arsenokoitai, the two words now often translated as “homosexuals,” do not necessarily refer to homosexuality at all, but only to debauched people (in the general sense) and anal intercourse, which need not be with a man. And the most famous story, the Sodom and Gemorrah story, can only be seen as a parable against homosexuality on a very strained interpretation. While Sodom becomes a constant symbol of sinfulness in the Old Testament, Sodom's sin is *never* explicitly identified as homosexuality. In fact, it *is* identified explicitly in several places, most notably Ezekiel 16, that Sodom was
morally and ethically lax, ignoring the poor and practicing the worst
inhospitality. Further, none of the other passages traditionally understood as condemning homosexuality made any reference to the Sodom story. Fourthly, it has been widely noted that the Bible sanctions many practices which are ethically reprehensible nowadays, such as the selling of women and children into slavery, or in justly murdering your enemies. There are other Biblical sanctions which we would regard as totally ethically neutral, such as the wearing of polyester clothing. Fifthly and most simply, I myself and many others do not accept the Bible as authoritative. One may claim that revelation is infallible, but our *human judgment
that some teaching or other is infallible* must always be suspect. The idea that a a collection of 66 books that is over a thousand years old, and written in a wildly different cultural context, has settled everything for all time, strikes me as very odd indeed. It may be very comforting to some people to believe that they need not think for themselves, but merely need to crack open a book for answers to all their questions, but life just isn't that simple. No book contains all the correct answers. If it did, presumably the world would be in a better state than it is now.
Those are the arguments I can think of at the moment. As I have stated, I find them all inadequate. The fact is, some people are gay. We still don't know exactly how or why homosexuality came to exist. But it does. And it seems very cruel to me, cruel and petty at the most basic level, to deny sexual closeness to anyone simply because it is not heterosexual sex. I can see no way in which there is any harm done to anyone by homosexual sex between consenting adults, but can see many ways in which the lives of both the partners themselves and the lives of those around them can be enriched by their devotion. If someone can tell me ways in which homosexual sex and homosexual relationships
*are* harmful to other individuals or to society, I would like to hear them, because I certainly can't think of any.
