Why Religious People Are Against Gay Marriage
A Common Missed Conception
Slate,
November 19, 2003
http://slate.msn.com/id/2091413/
By Steven Waldman
It’s hard to overstate just
how upset religious conservatives are about gay marriage. Gary Bauer’s
e-mail newsletter about the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruling declared,
“Culture Wars Go Nuclear.” Brian Fahling of the American Family
Association said it was “on an order of magnitude that is beyond the
capacity of words. The Court has tampered with society’s DNA, and the
consequent mutation will reap unimaginable consequences for Massachusetts and
our nation.”
A new poll from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life found, not
surprisingly, that opposition to gay marriage and homosexuality is highest
among the most religious.
Poignantly, homosexuality would seem to be the one topic that unites the
leaders of the world’s faiths—an issue over which Franklin Graham and
Malaysia’s Mahathir Mohamed could break bread. Even the Dalai Lama views it
as “sexual misconduct.” (But don’t mention this to the liberal Hollywood
Buddhist set.)
Why exactly are religious folks opposed to gay marriage? The most
fashionable argument against it is that it undermines the institution of
marriage (and therefore family and therefore society), but I can’t help but
think this is a poll-tested idea that doesn’t really get at the true
feelings of the advocates; in the Pew poll, few people opposing the notion of
gay marriage offered that up as the main reason. Most said, instead, that gay
marriage and homosexuality were inherently “wrong” or violated their
religious beliefs.
The world’s sacred texts are silent on the question of gay marriage, as
it was not really an issue when they were written. However, those same texts
do have strong opinions on homosexuality itself. Though there are differences
in the views of different faiths, conservative Protestants, the Catholic
Church, Mormons, traditional Jews, and Muslims share two fundamental antigay
arguments.
The first is that homosexuality is wrong because it involves sex that
doesn’t create life. In the case of Judaism, a key Bible passage is the
story of Onan, who sleeps with his dead brother’s wife but, to avoid giving
his brother offspring, doesn’t ejaculate inside her. Instead, he “spilt
the seed on the ground.” God slew him, which some might view as a sign of
disapproval.
The Catholic catechism decries homosexual acts because “they close the
sexual act to the gift of life.” Early American antisodomy laws discouraged
all forms of non-procreative sex (including, incidentally, heterosexual oral
and anal sex). Islam shares a similar view. One Islamic hadith explains that
Allah “will not look at the man who commits sodomy with a man or a woman.”
But if non-procreative sex is the issue, society started down the slippery
slope not with the recent Supreme Court ruling but with production of the
pill—or, really, even earlier, when birth control became common. We’ve
been into the non-procreative sex thing for some time now. Even most religious
conservatives don’t have the heart to go after this. If sex without the
possibility of creating life is wrong, then religious leaders would have to go
back to warring against masturbation. And what about sex among the infertile?
Or sex among people over 70? Only the Catholic Church has maintained logical
consistency, gamely reasserting its opposition to birth control on those same
grounds as recently as this week.
The other moral argument put forward by the world’s great faiths is that
homosexuality is “unnatural.” God created man and woman with certain
complementary capacities, and not to use them is an insult to the Creator.
Sort of like getting TiVo but not learning how to use the record feature.
Christian Bible scholar Ben Witherington explains the views of the apostle
Paul this way: “For Paul, not unlike other early Jewish writers, homosexual
behavior is perhaps the clearest example of how flouting sexual distinctions
is ultimately a rejection of the Creator, who made such distinctions.”
But Witherington, a conservative scholar, goes on to point out that all
sorts of sins involve the implicit rejection of God or His commandments and
that homosexuality is on par with covetousness, malice, envy, murder, slander,
insolence, rebellion against parents, ruthlessness, deceit, pride, and the
like-not one destined to destroy society. (And liberals, of course, believe
the Bible does not discourage homosexuality at all.)
In other words, many of the world’s faiths do argue against
homosexuality, but they don’t raise it to the level of moral calamity:
It’s bad but not that bad. Privately, religious conservatives are appalled
and grossed out by homosexuality but realize that the more common American
view is modulated. So, they choose to focus on the idea that marriage in
general is under threat. Read their public statements, and you’ll see a
surprising shortage of outrage about homosexuality itself. Perhaps they’ve
been reading their Bibles more carefully. More likely, they’ve figured out
that the most effective argument for religious conservatives is not, in fact,
a religious one.
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