Playing Both Sides
Yeah, so I’ve been conspicuously absent for a little over a week. Things have been busy, and this blog remains a hobby — a fun one, to be sure, but when things heat up, it’s one of the first things to get cut from the schedule. So it goes. But now I’m back, and taking the cheap route to a successful blog entry by ripping a topic off InstaPundit. So…
President Bush made a splash yesterday with a statement that marriage should be reserved for heterosexuals — brought up by, among other things, Canada’s complete legalization of gay marriage earlier this month. Noted gay conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan is, predictably, on the edge of hysteria. Glenn Reynolds of InstaPundit is unsure where this statement is leading, but doesn’t think the issue of a Constitutional amendment banning gay marriage is going to come to a head right now.
Reynolds has it almost right, I think, when he says “Most Americans, I think, are increasingly comfortable with gay people, but not as comfortable with the idea that gayness itself is truly acceptable. That’s changing, but the process is still underway.” Where he’s off the mark is his apparent non-recognition that a large number of people will never accept homosexuality as morally equivalent to heterosexuality.
The thing is, there’s a compromise that both sides are dancing around (no pun intended), and for which I think President Bush may be laying the groundwork.
It is possible to believe that homosexuality is wrong, but to still believe that homosexual people deserve protection under the law. The key word in this whole debate, I think, is marriage. Marriage has been defined for all of known human history, across nearly every recorded human culture, as between male and female. (Note that I left out any indication of numbers.) Trying to change that is, to put it mildly, a huge task.
I’ll fight against moral recognition of homosexuality. I played a key role in that battle in 1998 and 1999 at the Student Forum of the United Methodist Student Movement, when activist delegates brought forth proposals that the UMSM endorse gay marriage and ordination of gay pastors in the 2000 General Conference. The church should not endorse homosexuality any more or less than it endorses any other form of sin, and I’ll proudly hold that line. (The church’s business, though, is accepting the sinners that all of us are, and leading us to repent from our sins.)
But whether you believe homosexuality is right or wrong, it’s tough to deny that it’s a part of our society now. The Supreme Court’s decision striking down the Texas anti-sodomy law was overdue, simply because the government doesn’t belong in the business of regulating the private behavior of consenting adults, no matter who they are. Gay people deserve the equal protection that they are due as human beings and that the United States Constitution provides. Something is going to have to be done — if for no reason other than problems of joint ownership of property, probate of wills, etc. Perhaps Vermont-style civil unions are where the country as a whole is headed (and with that, the eventual recognition that the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act likely violates the “full faith and credit” clause of the Constitution).
It won’t make the promoters of moral equivalence happy (they won’t accept anything less than the word “marriage”), and the wanna-be theocrats of Jerry Falwell’s stripe will flip out (shoot, they already did so over the sodomy decision). But for a compromise like civil unions to gain partial acceptance from social/moral conservatives, it’s going to have to be endorsed by some of their own. President Bush almost certainly won’t go that far during his time in office (whether it ends in 2005 or 2009), but his comparatively mild statement yesterday could start the Republican party’s ball rolling in that direction.
31 July 2003 / 5 Comments / Tags: politics