LGBT people are now able to marry in England and Wales, as a result of a campaign pioneered by the UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, which received cross-party support (with the exception of the homophobic Democratic Unionist Party) in the UK Parliament.
It happened in spite of a campaign orchestrated by dogmatic religious adherents, who tried to undermine confidence in the ultimate success of the campaign, conjecturing that the Prime Minister was intending to "kick the legislation into the long grass" and that the measure would be defeated in the House of Lords, the UK Parliament's second chamber. Neither of these things happened.
There is not a single valid argument against same-sex marriage, and below I list what seem to me to be the main objections advanced by opponents, and why they do not stand up to scrutiny.
If we allow gay marriage, we might as well allow people to marry members of their close family.
But for this to happen, incest would have to be legalised. This would remove a social taboo that discourages the molestation of children by adults in their family, and lead to increased levels of child abuse. It would also undermine the stability of families, which is something that will have a serious effect on the emotional well-being of individuals in society. Romantic relationships often end in acrimony and alienation. If we start condoning romantic relationships with relatives, the break-ups and divided loyalties will tear our families and society apart. Family relationships are those that tend to provide emotional stability over long periods of time. And in the case of heterosexuals, of course, incest is likely to cause birth defects.
If we allow gay marriage, the institution of the family will be undermined by devaluing traditional heterosexual marriage.
Opponents of equality used to say that condoning gay sex would lead to the destruction of society. Indeed, Emperor Constantine believed that homosexuality caused earthquakes. Now it’s apparently equal marriage that will bring about the Apocalypse.
Same-sex marriage will have no impact on the marriages of heterosexual couples. Gay people buy bread in the supermarket. That doesn’t stop heterosexual people buying bread, or make it taste any different to them. No-one is proposing we should make same-sex marriage obligatory. Canada has had equal marriage for eight years at the time of writing. When is this societal breakdown meant to start happening?
Gay marriage is opposed by religious Scripture and is offensive to many people of religious belief.
Fortunately, western democracies are not theocracies. Many of these objecting minority fundamentalist religionists are of the kind that historically opposed the decriminalisation of homosexuality, and of the kind that in many cases abuse their children by brainwashing them and telling them they risk burning in Hell for eternity. Why should this religious minority be allowed to impose its religious beliefs against the will of the democratic majority, with the result that another minority group’s civil liberties are denied?
The fundamentalists who organise against equal marriage are, for the most part, a bunch of sanctimonious hypocrites.
So many of those Christians who profess to believe that scripture should be taken literally as the revealed word of God, prefer to overlook the repeated Biblical warnings that the wealthy will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven, and that their wealth should be given to the poor.
Many anti-gay Christians manage to find a way of conveniently reinterpreting Jesus’ warnings about the sin of wealth, while continuing to condemn others for breaking the letter of the law in scripture with regard to sexual behaviour. This is cherry-picking.
Gay people can marry someone of the opposite sex, so they already have the same rights as everyone else with regard to marriage.
Gay people do not have ‘equal rights’ just because they have the right to marry a member of the opposite sex.
Gay people don’t want to marry a member of the opposite sex. They want to marry a member of the same sex, if they choose to do so, because that is who they are sexually and emotionally attracted to and bond with.
This anti-equal marriage argument is the equivalent of an Apartheid supporter saying that prohibiting mixed-race marriages is not a violation of equal rights, as each partner in a mixed-race relationship has the right to marry someone of their own race. (Indeed, the Dutch Reformed Church supported the outlawing of mixed-race marriages, and claimed to find their justification in Scripture: an interesting parallel to the current opposition to equal marriage.)
It is similar to a hospital only stocking Group A blood, and telling someone who had a Group B blood type and needed a transfusion, that he was not being treated any differently from other patients, as he also had an ‘equal right’ to a Group A blood transfusion.
Gay people cannot change the meaning of the word ‘marriage’, because it has a longstanding dictionary definition of being between one man and one woman.
Definitions change without the concept defined becoming meaningless, so long as the change is of something non-essential to the meaning of the term.
Some may think that two people of the same sex cannot marry because that would entail a violation of the essential meaning of ‘marriage’. However, the similarities between gay and heterosexual marriage in terms of commitment, love, care and intimacy, override the differences, which are simply that the two people are of the same sex, rather than of the opposite sex.
For instance, the Anglican Church recently ordained women to the priesthood. Most people accept that being female does not disqualify someone from being a priest. But the definition of “Anglican priest” changed, and most would say for the better.
Opponents of equal marriage may refer to history and tradition to support their argument, but people who counter the liberal view about women priests can also refer to two thousand years of tradition.
There is a further parallel with the term “democracy”. The definition of “suffrage” used to exclude votes for women. Those who resisted women’s suffrage might well have complained that “democracy” traditionally meant allowing the vote to men and not women, and that this meaning was essential to the traditional definition of “democracy”. Indeed, social conservatives could have referred to longstanding tradition and precedent to support their position.
The Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa regarded marriage between people of different races as something violating their contemporary definition of marriage, which was the reason why it was illegal until campaigners forced a change in the law.
Most people recognise that a committed gay or lesbian relationship is not different enough in the relevant respects automatically to disqualify it from the essential definition of ‘marriage’ should the partners wish to make that public commitment, and the state allow it.
Just as women’s suffrage was a perfection of the concept of democracy and not a redefinition of it, both interracial marriage and same-sex marriage are a perfection of the concept of marriage.
Marriage is for procreation. Therefore, as same-sex couples cannot procreate between them, they cannot enter into a valid marriage.
Having biological children with both parents’ genes, is not intrinsic to the currently held concept of how marriage is defined. There are plenty of people whose marriages aren’t regarded as invalid simply because they do not have children, either from choice or because of medical problems.
Gay marriage will lead to marriage to animals and polygamy.
An animal cannot have a reciprocal empathic social relationship with a human. A human can with another human, though. And a human can have such a relationship, contract to make it a faithful, exclusive one, and make a commitment to it. If that relationship has a certain indefinable romantic or sexual quality, then the parties may consider getting married.
An animal is not a human, and cannot consent to a relationship, and cannot love, interact empathically, make sacrifices or make commitments. That kind of relationship is so far different from a marriage that it disqualifies for the definition.
The same applies to polygamy, which is also fundamentally different from our current concept of marriage, involving as it does an exclusive commitment between two people. Equal marriage is not different in any significant respect from the current concept of marriage: it is between two consenting adult humans, who would both currently be entitled to marry a member of the opposite sex if they were not gay.
The campaign for gay marriage should be opposed on the grounds that gay and lesbian people don’t want equality: they want sameness.
Gay and lesbian people do not want to be ‘the same’ as ‘heterosexual’: they want to be ‘the same’ as ‘married’. In the same way, women priests do not want to be ‘the same’ as ‘men’: they want to be ‘the same’ as ‘ordained’.
Black people who are forced to sit at the back of the bus do not want to be ‘the same’ as white people: they want to be ‘the same’ in terms of their dignity and recognition of their human rights. Black people did not accept that they had to put up with being forced to sit at the back of the bus when the reactionaries said they had to because that was the way it had always been, or because they were still able to make their journey regardless. By the same token, gay and lesbian people should not have to sit at the back of the bus with their ‘civil partnerships’ because their relationships do not qualify for what is perceived by opponents as the higher status of ‘marriage’, exclusive to heterosexuals.
Gay people have the same rights as those conferred by heterosexual marriage when they enter into a civil partnership. Calling the civil partnership ‘marriage’ would therefore not confer any additional rights.
If this issue only involves a dispute over the redefinition of a word, then why is there so much opposition to it? It is the fierce and vocal opposition to equal marriage, with the intemperate language that is being used in some quarters, that provides an indication of why the legalisation of equal marriage is so important.
An important new right provided by the legalisation of equal marriage would be the simple right for some LGBT unions henceforth to be described as a ‘marriage’. This is important, because there is still a strong sense among people who grow up gay and lesbian that they are different from mainstream people in a significant respect, evidenced by the fact that so many gay and lesbian people continue to hide their sexual identity.
There is still an alarmingly high incidence of homophobic bullying in schools, and that the frequency of violent attacks against gay and lesbian people has increased in recent years. The attempt by social conservatives to isolate LGBT people and their relationships as being so radically different as to require a special label for their committed unions, fuels such prejudice.
According the status of marriage to gay and lesbian unions will be a clear statement of parity and endorsement on the part of the Government, which will model in an unequivocal way our society’s acceptance of lesbian and gay people as fully equal citizens.
Forbidding interracial couples to marry was sheer prejudice, whereas forbidding same-sex couples to marry is sheer logic.
Only a very small minority of people with extreme views would regard a marriage between two people of different race as something that violated the proper definition of marriage, and that was socially unacceptable to the degree that it should be made illegal.
But this was exactly the position of the Apartheid South African state, supported by its Dutch Reformed Church that defended its racist ideology by referring to Scripture.
So many of the arguments made against equal marriage could equally have been made against interracial marriage under Apartheid or Segregation. It is probable that, in a few decades’ time, people will look back on the opposition to equal marriage in the same way that we now look back on the opposition to interracial marriage: with a sense of outrage at the profound injustice and blinkered thinking.
A new, progressive consciousness is gradually dawning in countries where there is freedom to debate, to disseminate information, and to challenge the diktats of authority, including the arrogant authority of religious orthodoxy. The flimsy arguments of those who oppose equal marriage, which rest on a barely-concealed belief that LGBT people and LGBT relationships are inferior to their heterosexual counterparts, will not prevail against the gradual but ultimately benign progression of history, as human consciousness and human compassion cast off the shackles of ignorant religious dogmatism.
© Gary Powell, 2014
It happened in spite of a campaign orchestrated by dogmatic religious adherents, who tried to undermine confidence in the ultimate success of the campaign, conjecturing that the Prime Minister was intending to "kick the legislation into the long grass" and that the measure would be defeated in the House of Lords, the UK Parliament's second chamber. Neither of these things happened.
There is not a single valid argument against same-sex marriage, and below I list what seem to me to be the main objections advanced by opponents, and why they do not stand up to scrutiny.
If we allow gay marriage, we might as well allow people to marry members of their close family.
But for this to happen, incest would have to be legalised. This would remove a social taboo that discourages the molestation of children by adults in their family, and lead to increased levels of child abuse. It would also undermine the stability of families, which is something that will have a serious effect on the emotional well-being of individuals in society. Romantic relationships often end in acrimony and alienation. If we start condoning romantic relationships with relatives, the break-ups and divided loyalties will tear our families and society apart. Family relationships are those that tend to provide emotional stability over long periods of time. And in the case of heterosexuals, of course, incest is likely to cause birth defects.
If we allow gay marriage, the institution of the family will be undermined by devaluing traditional heterosexual marriage.
Opponents of equality used to say that condoning gay sex would lead to the destruction of society. Indeed, Emperor Constantine believed that homosexuality caused earthquakes. Now it’s apparently equal marriage that will bring about the Apocalypse.
Same-sex marriage will have no impact on the marriages of heterosexual couples. Gay people buy bread in the supermarket. That doesn’t stop heterosexual people buying bread, or make it taste any different to them. No-one is proposing we should make same-sex marriage obligatory. Canada has had equal marriage for eight years at the time of writing. When is this societal breakdown meant to start happening?
Gay marriage is opposed by religious Scripture and is offensive to many people of religious belief.
Fortunately, western democracies are not theocracies. Many of these objecting minority fundamentalist religionists are of the kind that historically opposed the decriminalisation of homosexuality, and of the kind that in many cases abuse their children by brainwashing them and telling them they risk burning in Hell for eternity. Why should this religious minority be allowed to impose its religious beliefs against the will of the democratic majority, with the result that another minority group’s civil liberties are denied?
The fundamentalists who organise against equal marriage are, for the most part, a bunch of sanctimonious hypocrites.
So many of those Christians who profess to believe that scripture should be taken literally as the revealed word of God, prefer to overlook the repeated Biblical warnings that the wealthy will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven, and that their wealth should be given to the poor.
Many anti-gay Christians manage to find a way of conveniently reinterpreting Jesus’ warnings about the sin of wealth, while continuing to condemn others for breaking the letter of the law in scripture with regard to sexual behaviour. This is cherry-picking.
Gay people can marry someone of the opposite sex, so they already have the same rights as everyone else with regard to marriage.
Gay people do not have ‘equal rights’ just because they have the right to marry a member of the opposite sex.
Gay people don’t want to marry a member of the opposite sex. They want to marry a member of the same sex, if they choose to do so, because that is who they are sexually and emotionally attracted to and bond with.
This anti-equal marriage argument is the equivalent of an Apartheid supporter saying that prohibiting mixed-race marriages is not a violation of equal rights, as each partner in a mixed-race relationship has the right to marry someone of their own race. (Indeed, the Dutch Reformed Church supported the outlawing of mixed-race marriages, and claimed to find their justification in Scripture: an interesting parallel to the current opposition to equal marriage.)
It is similar to a hospital only stocking Group A blood, and telling someone who had a Group B blood type and needed a transfusion, that he was not being treated any differently from other patients, as he also had an ‘equal right’ to a Group A blood transfusion.
Gay people cannot change the meaning of the word ‘marriage’, because it has a longstanding dictionary definition of being between one man and one woman.
Definitions change without the concept defined becoming meaningless, so long as the change is of something non-essential to the meaning of the term.
Some may think that two people of the same sex cannot marry because that would entail a violation of the essential meaning of ‘marriage’. However, the similarities between gay and heterosexual marriage in terms of commitment, love, care and intimacy, override the differences, which are simply that the two people are of the same sex, rather than of the opposite sex.
For instance, the Anglican Church recently ordained women to the priesthood. Most people accept that being female does not disqualify someone from being a priest. But the definition of “Anglican priest” changed, and most would say for the better.
Opponents of equal marriage may refer to history and tradition to support their argument, but people who counter the liberal view about women priests can also refer to two thousand years of tradition.
There is a further parallel with the term “democracy”. The definition of “suffrage” used to exclude votes for women. Those who resisted women’s suffrage might well have complained that “democracy” traditionally meant allowing the vote to men and not women, and that this meaning was essential to the traditional definition of “democracy”. Indeed, social conservatives could have referred to longstanding tradition and precedent to support their position.
The Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa regarded marriage between people of different races as something violating their contemporary definition of marriage, which was the reason why it was illegal until campaigners forced a change in the law.
Most people recognise that a committed gay or lesbian relationship is not different enough in the relevant respects automatically to disqualify it from the essential definition of ‘marriage’ should the partners wish to make that public commitment, and the state allow it.
Just as women’s suffrage was a perfection of the concept of democracy and not a redefinition of it, both interracial marriage and same-sex marriage are a perfection of the concept of marriage.
Marriage is for procreation. Therefore, as same-sex couples cannot procreate between them, they cannot enter into a valid marriage.
Having biological children with both parents’ genes, is not intrinsic to the currently held concept of how marriage is defined. There are plenty of people whose marriages aren’t regarded as invalid simply because they do not have children, either from choice or because of medical problems.
Gay marriage will lead to marriage to animals and polygamy.
An animal cannot have a reciprocal empathic social relationship with a human. A human can with another human, though. And a human can have such a relationship, contract to make it a faithful, exclusive one, and make a commitment to it. If that relationship has a certain indefinable romantic or sexual quality, then the parties may consider getting married.
An animal is not a human, and cannot consent to a relationship, and cannot love, interact empathically, make sacrifices or make commitments. That kind of relationship is so far different from a marriage that it disqualifies for the definition.
The same applies to polygamy, which is also fundamentally different from our current concept of marriage, involving as it does an exclusive commitment between two people. Equal marriage is not different in any significant respect from the current concept of marriage: it is between two consenting adult humans, who would both currently be entitled to marry a member of the opposite sex if they were not gay.
The campaign for gay marriage should be opposed on the grounds that gay and lesbian people don’t want equality: they want sameness.
Gay and lesbian people do not want to be ‘the same’ as ‘heterosexual’: they want to be ‘the same’ as ‘married’. In the same way, women priests do not want to be ‘the same’ as ‘men’: they want to be ‘the same’ as ‘ordained’.
Black people who are forced to sit at the back of the bus do not want to be ‘the same’ as white people: they want to be ‘the same’ in terms of their dignity and recognition of their human rights. Black people did not accept that they had to put up with being forced to sit at the back of the bus when the reactionaries said they had to because that was the way it had always been, or because they were still able to make their journey regardless. By the same token, gay and lesbian people should not have to sit at the back of the bus with their ‘civil partnerships’ because their relationships do not qualify for what is perceived by opponents as the higher status of ‘marriage’, exclusive to heterosexuals.
Gay people have the same rights as those conferred by heterosexual marriage when they enter into a civil partnership. Calling the civil partnership ‘marriage’ would therefore not confer any additional rights.
If this issue only involves a dispute over the redefinition of a word, then why is there so much opposition to it? It is the fierce and vocal opposition to equal marriage, with the intemperate language that is being used in some quarters, that provides an indication of why the legalisation of equal marriage is so important.
An important new right provided by the legalisation of equal marriage would be the simple right for some LGBT unions henceforth to be described as a ‘marriage’. This is important, because there is still a strong sense among people who grow up gay and lesbian that they are different from mainstream people in a significant respect, evidenced by the fact that so many gay and lesbian people continue to hide their sexual identity.
There is still an alarmingly high incidence of homophobic bullying in schools, and that the frequency of violent attacks against gay and lesbian people has increased in recent years. The attempt by social conservatives to isolate LGBT people and their relationships as being so radically different as to require a special label for their committed unions, fuels such prejudice.
According the status of marriage to gay and lesbian unions will be a clear statement of parity and endorsement on the part of the Government, which will model in an unequivocal way our society’s acceptance of lesbian and gay people as fully equal citizens.
Forbidding interracial couples to marry was sheer prejudice, whereas forbidding same-sex couples to marry is sheer logic.
Only a very small minority of people with extreme views would regard a marriage between two people of different race as something that violated the proper definition of marriage, and that was socially unacceptable to the degree that it should be made illegal.
But this was exactly the position of the Apartheid South African state, supported by its Dutch Reformed Church that defended its racist ideology by referring to Scripture.
So many of the arguments made against equal marriage could equally have been made against interracial marriage under Apartheid or Segregation. It is probable that, in a few decades’ time, people will look back on the opposition to equal marriage in the same way that we now look back on the opposition to interracial marriage: with a sense of outrage at the profound injustice and blinkered thinking.
A new, progressive consciousness is gradually dawning in countries where there is freedom to debate, to disseminate information, and to challenge the diktats of authority, including the arrogant authority of religious orthodoxy. The flimsy arguments of those who oppose equal marriage, which rest on a barely-concealed belief that LGBT people and LGBT relationships are inferior to their heterosexual counterparts, will not prevail against the gradual but ultimately benign progression of history, as human consciousness and human compassion cast off the shackles of ignorant religious dogmatism.
© Gary Powell, 2014
