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Three Arguments Against Marriage Equality:
Two Old, One New, None Terribly Convincing
By Dale Debakcsy
On Tuesday evening, I witnessed our town's first ever Marriage Equality debate. I suspect, and certainly hope, that these events are happening all over the country now with a frequency that might strike gay rights advocates of twenty years ago as incredible. I think it a worthwhile thing to go through some of the arguments against Gay Marriage that were brought up in the course of the debate, as some of them are rather new.
There were three speakers coming out against Marriage Equality. The first was an earnest, Elmer Gantryish young lad who waved his Bible about like something from a Shaker's Revival, quoting Scripture at length to show that God does not approve of gay marriage, and that these passages in the Bible override those which tend towards toleration and love. This is an old argument, one might say THE old argument, and it works about as well as ever. The whole thing rises and falls on whether you think the Bible is an infallible source of morality.
The secret is: No One Does. The most fervent Bible Belt Believer no more thinks that the Bible gets its morality right all the time than the most skeptical of atheists. I have asked many stout defenders of The Faith if they believe that murdering children for political ends is a moral good. They universally say no, because they are good people. I then point out that this is precisely what God orders done to the children of Egypt, and also to many of the tribes that had no fault other than that their towns happened to stand in the way of the expansion of God's Chosen. The response is pretty much always the same, "Yes, but those were different times - God's changed since then, just look at the New Testament! He's all about love now!"
I don't see what this changes, though. If somebody informed me that Joseph Stalin spent the last ten years of his life building kitten orphanages, I wouldn't suddenly believe him to be an infallible moral source. At that point, the ingrained believer generally responds that, "You don't understand - God HAD to use those means, because that's the only thing that the people of those times could understand." This is the same thing as saying that God's word changes over time, and if that's the case, then what he said about marriage back then may or may not hold now - it is quite literally impossible to know, and it is not the place of any mortal to say what has changed and what hasn't. To cause hundreds of thousands of people to suffer on the strength of one's belief that one has that insight and right to speak for God is more morally wrong than anything that could ever come of letting two people get married.
Moving on to the more sophisticated arguments, then. There was an argument from epigenetics, an argument which had been criticized by many writers (myself included) in our local paper prior to the debate, but which was presented to us essentially unaltered in the debate itself, no pains being taken to amend the present faults. The reasoning ran something like this: Being Gay is like obesity and alcoholism in that it is a trait that increases in frequency during times of civilizational stress. The link between this supposed fact and why people possessing such a trait should not be allowed to marry was not made explicit, as the speaker spent his two chunks of allotted time explaining his biological notions on one hand and lamenting the fact that people dared criticize his motives on the other. There was a throwaway line about "Nature has objectively selected against this trait and Nature Never Lies," but your guess is as good as mine why evolution suddenly gets to write state policy.
I will say what I said the first time this gentleman aired his thoughts in our paper: the evidence is not there, and the Necessary Mechanism is lacking. The speaker repeated his broad, sweeping claims about the percent of the population that is born gay, and about the variation of that statistic over history, NONE OF WHICH WE ACTUALLY HAVE. Perhaps the gentleman is in possession of wonderful census data of the 17th century in which people declared their sexual orientation. If he is, he did not bring it forward, his physical evidence being a single study of the children of mothers in their first trimester during the Dresden bombing.
This study was released in 1982, and amounted to asking people of a certain age and birthplace if they were gay. The percentages turned out to be higher than expected for this particular group, which clearly denotes that the cortisol generated during stress makes your children gay. Unless you take into account the Vast Mountain of alternate explanations possible. The Hamburg Institute conducted two studies, one in 1970, and the other in 1990, inquiring into homosexual behavior. In the former, 18% of respondents reported having had a homosexual experience, in the latter, 2%. Clearly, cortisol is at work here! Those kids in the 1970 study were born in 1954, when things were... actually entirely fine, enjoying the post-Marshall Plan boom and waiting around for the Beatles to show up. But, if things were Basically Fine in 1954, and again Basically Fine in 1974, and epigenetics is supposed to be the Sole Determiner of sexuality, why the tremendous statistical difference? Pick one - the arrival of AIDS, the retrenchment of conservative thought in the 1980s in West Germany - there are many, many reasons why these numbers show fluctuation, and it is Horrendous science and questionable morality to suggest otherwise, especially if your doing so actually affects the lives and happiness of people around you.
In short, this gentleman had precisely ZERO data prior to the 20th century, and the only study he was able to dredge up for us was one where the necessity of the link between stress and orientation is not what the fellow would have us believe. When you see somebody presenting you a piece of data, and offering only one explanation for that data, without even bothering to mention others, you are not looking at a person interested in science. You are looking at a person interested in using a favorite bit of data as a sledgehammer to get his way. You only get to make these claims of Sufficient and Necessary Connection when every other contributing possibility has been ruled out. Science is not channel surfing. You don't get to stop when you find the thing you want.
Fundamentally, though, this argument doesn't matter, and I was happy to see that both the audience and the pro Marriage Equality speakers seized on this. Again, to actively go out of your way to make other people's lives less full merely because their genes are different than yours is wrong. Marriage is not an evolutionary institution, it is an affair created by humans, and as long as you're a human, you get to do it. Pure nature also tends to select against people who don't run very fast, but the last time I checked you don't have to run a 50 meter dash to get a marriage license.
Finally, and thank you for indulging me this long, there was a Slippery Slope argument ending, as it always does, in polygamy. The speaker was an intelligent person (as was the epigenetic fan, I might add, though clearly unused to scientific rigor), so I am going to take it as assumed that he did not actually believe the content of this argument. It takes no profound grasp of morality to realize that, to actually do something that is morally wrong (i.e. that impoverishes the lives at others to nobody's gain) in order to avoid something that might hypothetically happen later is to use other people as a shield from things you don't happen to like - "Go ahead and take this hit for me, guys, while I enjoy a night at home with my wife. That's not a problem, right? Slippery slope and all."
Even the most judicially daft of us realize that it is not morally permissible to let others to suffer for your gain, and especially not to Force them to suffer for your gain. "Everything is permissible as regards Other People so long as I get to call my marriage Traditional" is the credo of a deeply troubled soul. Presented with a theoretical future problem, the person who decides that the best solution is the one that involves no pain to them, but constant sacrifice from others, is not precisely a font of ethical action. The speaker is clearly a person of moral responsibility, and so the only conclusion is that this is not an argument he fully believes in. I have enough faith in human goodness to believe that the reason he employed the argument was because he thought it would be effective. People do that, from time to time - offer up a tenuous argument because they think it will convince Others, even if it doesn't convince themselves.
The problem is that Slippery Slope arguments, historically, have convinced nobody. If they did, it would be only white, property-owning males who would be marching to the polls come November. The Slippery Slope argument is, boiled down to its essence, an argument that change ought never happen so long as somebody somewhere can come up with an abstractly undesirable ending to it. It has been tried time and time again, and thankfully never actually won the day: "We can't let women vote, because in a century it will be given to bears, and THEN where will be?"
Ah, the speaker countered, but we didn't have to change the DEFINITION of voting to add more people to that particular institution, whereas we DO Have to change the definition of traditional marriage. I had to check my ears the first time I heard this - I was not aware that there was a dictionary that defined the Platonic Form of Marriage for us, the absolutely constant and idealized structure of it against which all marriages are to be checked. Apparently, the speaker had such a dictionary because he insisted vehemently several times that such a thing as Traditional Marriage exists and that it would be a horrid affront to let anybody else in on it besides the people we've let in so far. That this Eternal, Traditional concept has only existed for 8% of man's time upon this Earth is clearly of no concern. We are, apparently, free to choose the most popular form of male-female relation of whatever slice of human history we desire, and lock that in as Traditional. You can do that, right?
Again, this doesn't really matter in the larger context of Marriage Equality, but it's something you hear a lot, and it's overall to the good to have the internal inconsistencies and acts of historical amnesia at the core of them publicly stated from time to time. The real issue is not the slippery slope - it is a morally bankrupt position and a tactically ineffective one that was beneath his skills. It's that, somehow, traditional marriage (whatever that means) will suffer as a result of letting homosexuals get married.
How?
The speaker asserted that it is another attempt to attack the structure of marriage, like feminism (his words, not mine). Just as it was a horrid thing for marriage when women no longer had to simply Put Up With being beaten or having the entire content of their lives dictated to them, so will it be the last stroke to allow people of the same gender to have a piece of paper with the word "Marriage" on it.
On the feminism front, because the speaker brought it up, I would say that, anecdotally, the marriage of every single one of my contemporaries strikes me as infinitely more solid than those of my parents' generation, and the decrease in divorce rates backs that impression up. I think that marriages work when two people are operating at their full potential, and that's all feminism ever really wanted to say. On that of Marriage Equality, I admit to being baffled. HOW does the fact that the gay couple three doors down just got married have anything to do with the content of my own marriage? Will I look at my wife any differently? Will my love be any different? Is the nature of my relation with my spouse dependent on how many other people have spouses? If not, then it makes no difference to me who is married and who is not. Far from that, I think it makes my marriage better, the more people there are happily ensconced in the institution. I think it makes society better. Happy people do good things. Keeping people miserable in order to make your own privileged situation seem more exclusive does not make you better, does not make them better, and does not help society. It is merely mean-spirited without profit. Pragmatically, it is unwise, and morally, it is indefensible.
In spite of the verbiage, I think it is all really very simple. If you can make people happy without hurting anybody, you do it. You just do it. "But their genes are different", "But the pro-slavery guy who wrote this book a few thousand years ago doesn't like it", and "but I'd really rather let other people suffer so that I don't have to change a made-up definition" are not weighty enough considerations to allow us to actively keep people from being content and secure in their lives. It is not up to us as a society to Realize The Happiness of all of our citizens, but it is up to us not to get in the way of people seeking happiness when it does no harm. To say otherwise is to bring pain with nothing to compensate for it, and that is never okay.
- Count Dolby von Luckner
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