Kathryn Jean Lopez's post "Religion and Same-Sex Marriage," helps clarify a lot that remains fuzzy or not totally grasped in the minds of many liberals regarding the consequences of same-sex marriage. She writes:
The push in Illinois for gay marriage is instructive in the alarm bells it sounds on religious liberty (the Republican party chairman’s satisfaction on this front aside). As Bishop Thomas John Paprocki of Springfield explained it:
The pending bill is not only a dangerous social experiment about marriage. It is also a lethal attack upon religious liberty. This so-called “religious freedom” would not stop the state from obligating the Knights of Columbus to make their halls available for same-sex “weddings.” It would not stop the state from requiring Catholic grade schools to hire teachers who are legally “married” to someone of the same sex. This bill would not protect Catholic hospitals, charities, or colleges, which exclude those so “married” from senior leadership positions. Nor would it protect me, the Bishop of Springfield, if I refused to employ someone in a same-sex “marriage” who applied to the Diocese for a position meant to serve my ministry as your bishop. This “religious freedom” law does nothing at all to protect the consciences of people in business, or who work for the government. We saw the harmful consequences of deceptive titles all too painfully last year when the so-called “Religious Freedom Protection and Civil Union Act” forced Catholic Charities out of foster care and adoption services in Illinois.
These threats do not raise a question about drafting a better law, one with more extensive conscience protections. There is no possible way—none whatsoever—for those who believe that marriage is exclusively the union of husband and wife to avoid legal penalties and harsh discriminatory treatment if the bill becomes law. Why should we expect it be otherwise? After all, we would be people who, according to the thinking behind the bill, hold onto an “unfair” view of marriage. The state would have equated our view with bigotry—which it uses the law to marginalize in every way short of criminal punishment.
It’s an issue I’ve talked about with Tom Messner of Heritage and the aforementioned Robby George, among others. From an interview last year with Messner:
Same-sex marriage does not simply include more people in the definition of civil marriage; it labels the natural understanding of marriage as a form of irrational prejudice, ignorance, bigotry, and even hatred. In other words, same-sex-marriage laws teach the public that people who view marriage in the natural way are morally equivalent to racists.
Once this idea is embedded in the law, there will be enormous pressure to take it to its logical conclusion by marginalizing and penalizing people who continue to think marriage is one man and one woman. Some of this pressure will come from state sources and some will come from private sources, but in both cases it will find ways through whatever cracks might exist in protections for religious and moral conscience. As Princeton professor Robby George put it in your recent interview with him, “If you ask, ‘What can be done going forward around the country to protect religious liberty?’ the answer is this: Win the fight to preserve the legal definition of marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife. Period.”
So many of the most contentious issues of the day come down to a fundamental misunderstanding about words like freedom and equality. As I’ve discussed in recent days with Eric Metaxas and Christopher West, license isn’t the rock of civilization, but throws rocks at it, especially as we institutionalize and mandate (see the HHS Mandate) our radical misunderstandings.
See also her earlier column, "Is Gay marriage Inevitable?"
Well, the year started with a sudden sense that it might be in Illinois, and quickly. But the effort is stalled. For now. No thanks to the chairman of the state Republican party, who put his “full support” behind the legalization push.
The question we should be asking ourselves at this time in our history is not What is the future of marriage? It is: What are we doing, what are we going to do?
That’s paraphrased from a presentation Ryan Anderson gave at the Heritage Foundation on the question, “What is marriage?” As a fact, as a public policy issue, as the rock of civil society.
Why do government and law have a stake in marriage and a marriage culture? Because everything depends on the institution of marriage, Princeton’s Robert P. George points out.
But what about equality? Sherif Girgis addresses this up front. George Weigel, writing about the new Girgis-Anderson-George book on marriage, puts it well:
For almost two centuries, equality before the law had been denied to Americans of African descent; that blatant injustice was challenged by a movement of moral persuasion and legal maneuver; the movement was ultimately vindicated by a change of hearts, minds, and statutes. If then, on matters of race, why not now, on the question of who can marry? That’s the argument; it has considerable emotive power.
But it’s wrong.
In their recent book, What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense (Encounter Books), three Catholic thinkers with Princeton connections—Robert P. George (who holds Woodrow Wilson’s old chair at that eminent university) and two of his former students, Sherif Girgis and Ryan Anderson—argue persuasively, and on grounds of reason, that America can’t arrive at a serious answer to this question—Should government redefine marriage to include same-sex partnerships?—by appealing to equality.
Why not? Because every marriage policy in every polity known to history draws boundaries, excluding some types of relationships from marriage. Parents can’t marry their children. Brothers and sisters can’t marry. People beneath a certain age can’t marry. People who are already married can’t marry.
In other words, governments, whether autocratic, aristocratic, monarchical, or democratic, have always “discriminated”—i.e., made distinctions—in their marriage laws. And in that sense, there is no “equality” issue in marriage law similar to the equality that racial minorities rightly sought, and won, in the civil rights movement.
If marriage law is always going to involve distinctions, the moral (and legal/constitutional) question is whether the distinction inflicts a discrimination that is arbitrary or invidious. Or does the distinction inhere in the very nature of marriage and serve a genuine public good? In twenty-first-century post-modern culture, it’s hard to make an argument from the “nature” of anything. Try this, though. When the November 2, 2012, issue of Entertainment Weekly refers to Lincoln screenwriter Tony Kushner as “the husband of Entertainment Weekly columnist Mark Harris,” aren’t you jarred? Doesn’t something seem, not just unfamiliar, but mistaken? Do you have the same instinctive reaction—Something’s awry here—when reading a London Daily Mail headline from last October 23: “Ellen Degeneres receives comedy award as her gorgeous wife Portia De Rossi looks on”?
For millennia, governments have legally recognized the nature of “marriage” as the stable union of a man and a woman, both because that’s what it is and for good public policy reasons, including the well-being of children and the promotion of family life. Does that recognition involve distinctions? Yes. Does it result in injustice? No.
Children, religious liberty, and social reality all come up in the discussion at Heritage. You can watch their panel here: