2009-05-23 The Worst Thing About Gay Marriage

2009-05-23 Sam Schulman The Weekly Standard \Arguments against gay marriage http://weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/016/533narty.asp The Worst Thing About Gay Marriage The Worst Thing About Gay Marriage Date is from earliest-known review; the article itself is dated 2009-06-01, but it was available at least as early as 2009-05-26. There is a new consensus on gay marriage: not on whether it should be legalized but about the motives of those of us who oppose it. All agree that any and all opposition to gay marriage is explained either by biblical literalism or anti-homosexual bigotry. This consensus is brilliantly constructed to be so unflattering to those of us who will vote against gay marriage – if we are allowed to do so – that even biblical literalists and bigots are scrambling out of the trenches and throwing down their weapons.

But I think that the fundamental objection to gay marriage among most who oppose it has very little to do with one's feelings about the nature of homosexuality or what the Bible has to say about sodomy. The obstacle to wanting gay marriage is instead how we use and depend on marriage itself – and how little marriage, understood completely, affects or is relevant to gay people in love. Gay marriage is not so much wrong as unnecessary. But if it comes about, it will not be gay marriage that causes the harm I fear, as what will succeed its inevitable failure.

The embrace of homosexuality in Western culture has come about with unbelievable speed – far more rapidly than the feminist revolution or racial equality. Less than 50 years ago same-sex sexual intercourse was criminal. Now we are arguing about the term used to describe a committed relationship. Is the right to marry merely lagging behind the pace with which gays have attained the right to hold jobs – even as teachers and members of the clergy; to become elected officials, secret agents, and adoptive parents; and to live together in public, long-term relationships? And is the public, having accepted so rapidly all these rights that have made gays not just "free" but our neighbors, simply withholding this final right thanks to a stubborn residue of bigotry? I don't think so. Of course, he totally ignores the fact that homosexuality has been widely accepted as the norm in many cultures, including some Western ones... but TNR does a much better job of tearing Schulman's argument to pieces.

Commentary:
 * 2009-05-23 The Worst Case Yet Against Gay Marriage (The New Republic)
 * 2009-05-25 A Stupendously Terrible Argument Against Marriage Equality (Victor Maldonado, Pam's House Blend)

&ldquo;Author presents the non-Biblical and supposedly non-bigoted case against gay marriage.&rdquo;   