Marriage Equality: Seven Easy Answers

Last updated on: June 29, 2015 at 11:16 pm by Tom Swiss

Marriage Equality: Seven Easy Answers 2015-06-29T23:16:25-04:00 Tom Swiss

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Southern Baptist Samuel James has posed “7 Questions for the Victors” on the marriage equality issue — but forgot to turn comments on for his post.

Fortunately, I have this forum to reply. So: seven easy answers.

1) Certain there’s room in American public square for sentiment that defines religious marriage differently than the law does. Catholics have been in this situation for decades — they can cluck their tongues all they like about divorcées who get married down at the courthouse, or about Catholics who get married to Jews in interfaith ceremonies.

What there is not room for, is bigotry that seeks to deny civil marriage to some citizens — be they interfaith couples, interracial couples, or same-sex couples.

2) Of course it would be horrible if churches lost the liberty to perform only marriage ceremonies that are in line with their dogma. But this has never been on the table. Again I point you at the long-standing example of the Catholic Church in the United States.

No one is going to force a homophobic minister to perform a same-sex wedding any more than they’re going to force me to perform a wedding between two Christian Dominionists. (Yes, I have my papers, thanks Universal Life Church.)

3) The government certainly should recognize polyamorous marriage, and the full faith and credit clause demands that if one state allows such a marriage other states must recognize it. However, prima facie I don’t see that it’s a violation of equal protection for a state to limit legal arrangements that it creates to a specific number N of people, so long as any given group of N citizens is able to access that arrangement.

Image by Giovanni Dall’Orto, via Wikimedia Commons

4) If you have negative beliefs about homosexual people, ipso facto that’s homophobic. Just like if you have negative beliefs about black people, that’s racist. But the state should never be empowered to censor speech.

5) I’m not sure that a person who believes that gay and lesbian people should be second-class citizens could ever be a qualified applicant for a job in any company I might run, any more than a person who believed in racial segregation could be.

If a person accepts that legal right but believes that such a marriage isn’t spiritually valid, I wouldn’t care any more than I would care about a Catholic employee’s beliefs about marriages that aren’t valid in the eyes of the Church; so long as they treat people in such marriages with respect, none of my business.

6) I will answer a question with a question: does the fact that interracial marriage is now legal make genuinely hateful beliefs about interracial couples expressed in public more problematic, less problematic, or neutral? I guess you’d have to ask interracial couples from before 1967 and from today. Similarly, we’ll have to ask same-sex couples in a few decades.

7) To put it bluntly, it’s hard to see how someone with religious beliefs that are founded on bigotry could live out those beliefs in positive way. Fortunately, most people do tend to come around in time, they learn that their fears are unfounded and come to a broader understanding of the religious impulse.

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