Gay Marriage Issues: Response to Laine

This post is a response to Laine’s thoughtful post/essay on some of the issues involved in the “gay marriage” debate(s). She was interested in a religious person’s POV, and I figured I fit the bill. It’s a monstrous response, and didn’t fit in LiveJournal’s character limit. So, after the cut, the whole way-large response.

Hey, I’m a religious person (I feel like maybe I should check for some sort of brand or tattoo on my forehead… how many religious friends doyou have who read this LJ, anyway?). You say you want a look inside a religious person’s head on these issues, and I have a lot of respect for you, so here’s one religious person’s view. Beware: your essay was long, and so is this reply.

For me, quite a number of the arguments you list (against gay marriage) are irrelevant. They don’t map well onto my view of morality/reality. I see this entire area of discussion as being ultimately about epistemology. How do we know what we know? How well do we know it? Once we know, do we continue to trust the source and its message?

I have to agree that the secular arguments (both those you list and others I’ve heard) condemning gay marriage vary between interesting and crazy. For me, the best of the secular bases are logic and science, despite the latter’s well-documented limitations. Lots of the reasoning you mention under “secular” isn’t based in good science (obviously), or in good applications of logic, so it does nothing for me. Even if it were solid, science is a capricious, merciless master (or mistress). But that’s another discussion.

Personally, I am a huge fan of science, but I also believe in a more fundamental source of knowledge as well. Partly because of this (and partly because I am capable of rational thought) I have (so far) not found any secular reasoning line to be hugely convincing in its condemnation of gay marriage or its endorsement of nuclear, heterosexual families. Sociology can point to the stability of societies when they have lots of straight couples raising families, but this doesn’t logically imply that such stability would be untenable if 7% of those couples were gay, since we don’t really have data on that possibility. And some variations on the Western European Ideal have worked well for certain societies, as well.

The only  arguments, in my mind, can currently speak to the roots of this particular issue are those that come from nonscientific areas of inquiry, such as ethics, personal morality, applications of logic to current empirical data, or religious thought (which is my flava). Sadly, lots of religious arguments also fail to make sense. Some of them seem to boil down to “since I’m religious, I can reject rational thought and argue something based on an idiosyncratic interpretation of a religious text, which interpretation coincidentally supports my lifestyle and that of my immediate peers.” Still, just because some religious arguments (and, arguably, people) are ludicrous, it does not follow that all of them are.

At this point I’ll list some miscellaneous notes about the religious arguments you cite, and your comments on them. Although we both reject some of the same ideas, your rejection seems to come from a particular perspective. Perhaps I can expand.

Some of the above differences in interpretation come from an underlying conflict between ideologies: the question of whether certain behaviors truly negatively affect other people. Environmental practices, interpersonal violence, financial crimes, etc. are easy examples for most people I know: those should be proselyted, prescribed, regulated, and/or legislated. They should sometimes produce fear and avoidance. This is because we all agree that these things have the potential to meaningfully affect others. However, many people have a (to me) bizarre dualistic notion that religion cannot be relevant to the “real world.” Religious thought is assumed to exist on some plane distanced from our daily lives. In fact, some people (even some religious people) seem to define religion in those terms. I was once called a “fundamentalist” because I said I believed that my religious principles should have clear and concrete implications for the way I live my life.

My worldview includes — is dominated by, I hope — my religious beliefs. This causes me to evaluate many things differently. I see some behaviors as impacting others, when my non-religious (or differently-religious) peers do not. This perception leads me to treat my religious values similarly to how others treat their “secular” moral values.

My religion, if true (and obviously I believe it is), is a set of propositions that will lead  to maximum long-term happiness for humans, though I don’t always know exactly how. Adherence to this worldview often puts me in ideological opposition to people I care about, because of the divergent way I perceive the world. But I have had personal experiences (empirical and replicable, though not publicly verifiable, so not exactly scientific) that will not allow me to abandon this worldview, even when it gets extremely uncomfortable.

Getting back to the general issue of marriage and religion… much of the argument is circular: Marriage is religious because religion has been the main purveyor of marriage in the past. I agree that marriage has traditionally been a religious institution (though that affiliation has been quite variable through history, as I understand it; I also agree that neither marriage nor religion has historically always been good for people, as implemented), But now we are in a pickle, because our previously-religious governments are now secular, though they are still in control of marriage, without any legal recourse to the religious thinking that got it into the government realm in the first place. The resultant arguing and contorting is entertaining, but hardly productive. Personally, I’d be just fine with governments getting out of the marriage business, one way or another. But that’s me.

I know this is stupid long, but one final point: the casual term “gay marriage” subsumes at least four separate issues, any combination of which might be “hot button” issues, in either direction, for the person casually dropping the phrase:

1. The morality of same-sex interest/orientation
2. The morality of homosexual behavior
3. The desirability or morality of granting gay/lesbian individuals participation in the government-sponsored institution of marriage
4. The consequences (societal/sociological, psychological, economic, cultural, etc.) of extending the traditionally heterosexual institution of government-sponsored marriage to include gay and lesbian couples.

[nerd note: there are 2⁴ = 16 possible permutations of those issues for any given individual, assuming a simplistic "pro/con" position on each one].

All of these issues are relevant to the final question of whether or not gay marriage should be the subject of legislation (and if so, how). Asking whether a person is “for” or “against” “gay marriage” is misleading even before the person answers. It’s kind of like fmr. Pres. Bush’s insistence on lumping people into those who were “for” American “freedom,” and those who were “against” it. It’s equally wrongheaded to think that a “pro” or “con” on one of the four points automatically implies the same position on the others. There is a huge amount of pigeonholing going around in this debate, and the people driving the debate often like it that way.

I expect it will get more uncomfortable and painful before it becomes less so. Thanks, Laine, for giving this serious thought instead of just saying, “Gay marriage! Religious wackos! Am I right? Where my homies at!”