I’m introducing an interim topic while I continue my research on solutions for social justice, and am happy to be out of school for summer for the first time in three years. After perusing reader contributions to the commentary section on gay marriage in this past Sunday’s Orange County Register, I felt I should respond to the overloaded use of the word “equality” as the LGBT community likes to define it. Personally, I think if they took a hard look at the way they are trying to redefine this word, let alone marriage, they would see the logical fallacies of their arguments, and what the unintended consequences might be if they were to have their way. Specifically, the way they use the word equality makes the word mean that if someone, in their own mind, doesn’t feel like they’re getting what someone else has, then there is a fundamental inequality that exists and must thus be ameliorated so they can feel “equal.”
One young gentlemen wrote in to say that those who voted for Prop. 8 (the ballot measure that amends the CA constitution so it only recognizes marriage between a man and woman) chose to “fear and hate homosexuality rather than understand it.” So, according to him, anyone and everyone who voted for Prop. 8 fear and hate homosexuals while not understanding their lifestyle, and there is no possible alternative way of thinking. He further states that the ruling puts forth the idea that members of the LGBT community are not “equal” to those of the heterosexual community, so this is “discrimination by definition.” Well first, I would like to state that I don’t think he knows the mind of those who voted for Prop. 8 because he has probably not had a civil conversation with any of them. Anyone who chooses to paint others with a broad-brushed stroke to assert they know with certainty what others think without doing their due diligence is arguing speciously. I personally know of no one who fears or hates homosexuals, but they simply don’t agree that homosexuality should be accepted as a normative lifestyle. As to understanding the gay lifestyle, I think most people clearly understand monogamous homosexual relationships, but have little knowledge of the sexual profligacy of the gay “scene” in major metropolitan areas that has contributed greatly to HIV/AIDS transmission. This is the side of the gay lifestyle they don’t discuss in public. In fact, one of my best college friends contracted HIV/AIDS in the LA gay scene and is now back in Florida living with the unfortunate consequences of his chosen lifestyle.
On this gentleman’s second point, he states that members of the LGBT community are not equal to those of the heterosexual community, which is discrimination by definition. This is classically flawed thinking. There are few things in this life that are “equal,” but the inequality here does not imply discrimination in the sense that someone is somehow being slighted if all things are not being made “equal” to their liking. For example, in the eyes of God, Bill Gates and the poor children he is helping in Africa have an equal spiritual status. Yet they don’t have an equal economic status in terms of wealth. So is it inherently bad because Bill Gates won’t “equalize” his wealth with the children he helps, or is the issue that these poor families don’t have an equal opportunity to gain wealth, which Gates is pressing for? I would argue for the latter. Another example is my company’s eight weeks of paid maternity and paternity leave, respectively, for a mother and father having a child. Is it “unequal” that since I don’t have any children, I don’t get the same benefit? Yes it is, but as I stated, few things in this life are “equal.” So it would be the height of narcissism for me to presume that I should be treated “equal” to those who have children, since my situation is decidedly not “equal” to theirs. This could also be applied to tax benefits for married couples and to mortgage deductions, which are clearly “unequal” since others are, in essence, being discriminated against, but these policies are designed to serve the common good by encouraging responsible behavior that leads to societal stability.
Now as this relates to the young man who wrote to the Register, and another who goes even further, stating that the electorate has “disenfranchised and marginalized” a minority group (even comparing this situation to the days of Hitler and hysteria against the Jews), I will lay out my case in opposition. First, I would say that I am a minority whose people endured almost four hundred years of horrific slavery, Jim Crow, and “separate but unequal” status before achieving our full civil rights in 1964. To my knowledge, the LGBT community enjoys full protections under the law as I do, and have access to civil unions in California that provide benefits equivalent to heterosexual marriages. So I fail to see how this group is being disenfranchised, marginalized, or is suffering in any way as did Jews under Hitler or as blacks did under slavery and Jim Crow. They have freely chosen their lifestyles and are free to live their lives as they choose. But what they want at core is acceptance by the majority (and the church), yet they push for it under the guise of equality due to a mistaken idea of what equality truly means and the many dimensions in which equality may be defined. For millennia, societies have determined that male and female, in a committed relationship, set the normative definition of marriage that can produce children in concert with nature. Those who believe that is somehow inherently discriminatory clearly have no respect for the institution of traditional marriage and its stabilizing force in society, as they cannot marshal any demonstrated alternative superior to this norm other than to express their felt needs that their freely chosen alternative relationships should be “included” in this definition.
If we allow gay marriage then we must necessarily allow for polygamous marriages, “geometric” arrangements (such as “triads” and “quads”), and incestuous relationships, because the argument for gay marriage is the same as that in favor of any other alternative arrangement: it is one about choice and not about any inherently normative family structure. In her prescient book on worldview titled Total Truth, author Nancy Pearcey states that the social institution of marriage is a moral entity in itself, with its own normative definition, where there is a “good” for the individuals in the relationship and there is a “common good” for their lives together. She laments that we live in a time when “family bonds are rapidly dissolving in the acids of personal autonomy,” counter to the wisdom of traditionalist cultures where the clan or tribe takes precedence over the individual. In other words, we are allowing radical individualism to slowly and inexorably break the bonds of traditional family structures and values, with the outcome eventually being the breakdown of society itself. Somehow I don’t see these gentlemen that wrote to the register as seriously deliberating about the potential unintended consequences of gaining what they desire, as their arguments are about choices and feelings, and not a truly working definition of equality that accounts for the common good and what history has taught us.
* References
Pearcey, Nancy. Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity (Study Guide Edition). Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2005.
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