Hothouse flowers

John Rogers, of Kung Fu Monkey, has some shrewd fun with the logic of the self-proclaimed "defenders of marriage."

For the sake of argument — or at least, as the set-up for a good joke — he accepts the logic of their "sociological approach." This is the argument that the institution of marriage must not be weakened or tinkered with, lest society collapse. Accepting this premise, Rogers points out that same-sex couples do not seem to pose a serious threat to the institution of marriage — certainly not when compared to another, far more serious threat, which he proposes a constitutional amendment to protect us from:

If we want marriage to continue as a viable societal tradition, then we have to teach our young 'uns that marriage has value — but how are we to do this when their role models treat marriage so shabbily? Move past the prevalence of divorce in modern society and look at the glamorization of it by those most craven of cultural beasts — celebrities. …

What makes a stronger impact on the perceived value of marriage as an institution: skads of people lining up desperate to join in it despite great opposition; or people not only discarding their marriages, but discarding multiple marriages as if they were Dunkin' Donut cups? …

When prioritizing our threats against marriage, widespread rejection of the sanctity of marriage by our cultural icons propogated relentlessly through 24/7 media saturation is unarguably a greater threat against marriage's status as a societal value than the efforts of a few thousand malcontent high-school drama teachers standing in lines outside City Hall in two states of the Union.

So how do we stop this cultural plague? Well, we'll never win the fight to just out-and-out outlaw divorce: far too many powerful politicians and pundits depend on it as a way to mark their rise in power and income through progressive wife trade-ins. No, the roundabout solution here is to ban the marriage of celebrities in the first place, to keep them from spreading their disgusting guerrilla free-love meme when they eventually, inevitably dissolve these shams perpetrated in the Kabbalah ceremony of their choice. We at Kung Fu Monkey are proud to make the Defense Against Celebrity Marriage Amendment our first political cause.

There's a good deal more to Rogers' post, and you should read the whole thing because the excerpt above leaves out some of the funniest lines.

The interesting thing here, though, is that Rogers actually takes the logic of the marriage-defenders' "sociological approach" more seriously than they do themselves. He disagrees with it, and he ridicules it, but he also — despite the joking — seriously attempts to engage it:

To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, gay marriage neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. Two gay people getting married in my general vicinity do not change my legal rights. They do not affect my earning potential, they do not raise my taxes, they do not infringe on either my rights to certain freedoms or opportunities to practice such freedoms. They do not, in a negative way, affect the legal status of other marriages. Divorce case law and evolving property law defines my legal relationship with my wife far more than any other factor. The "slippery slope" argument will always be there, but again — case law, people. Legal Armageddon has been predicted from pretty much every sociological and technical advance in the last two centuries. We've limped along. If you can skate past the idea that it's legal in Georgia for a 60 year old man to have sex with a 16 year old girl but not cool for two 30 year old men to share a life insurance policy — good for you.

One may oppose gay marriage from a religious standpoint, but one's religious rights are not abridged. If one belongs to a religion which opposes gay marriage, then odds are there will not be any gay marriage in your church. Gay people will not paratroop in and occupy your vestry. You will not have to worship with them, change the personal nature of your relationship to God, or even like them.

Rogers' paraphrase of Jefferson, I think, gets at the crux of the disagreement. The MDs believe that same-sex marriage does, in fact, pick their pocket and break their leg because they believe that refusing to deny the human right of marriage to same-sex couples would — somehow — erode and weaken the institution itself.

That "somehow" is rarely articulated clearly. It is, rather, just implied as something intuitively, viscerally self-evident. When pressed on this point, some of the most vocal opponents of same-sex marriage begin rambling about box turtles and hot man-on-dog action. This makes it rather difficult for those of us who disagree with them to engage their argument. It's easy to lampoon their argument (Adam Felber's version is a classic), but not so easy to engage it.

I think the main reason that the MDs disagree with Rogers' paraphrase is that they also disagree with Jefferson's original statement, "But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are 20 gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."

In the terms of the First Amendment, the MDs seem to believe that their own free exercise of their religion requires a minimal establishment of that religion and its "family values." Without such a protective canopy, enforced by the state, they believe their own religion, their own way of life, is threatened. This protective canopy is eroded when other citizens with other religious perspectives — those neighbors who may believe in "20 gods or no God" — are allowed to freely exercise their religion.

We see a similar, if more extreme, dynamic playing out in countries like Afghanistan and Iraq. Certain devout, fundamentalist Muslims believe that their religion requires that women wear a head-to-toe burkha while in public. It does them little good if this practice is left as a matter of the free exercise of religion, because allowing pluralism would mean allowing those women who do not share their beliefs to appear in public without the burkha. This would be perceived by the fundamentalists as an assault on their own religious freedom — which they believe requires a public square devoid of temptresses flashing their sultry ankles and wrists. They thus see their own right to the free exercise of religion as requiring the legal establishment of their own religious values.

This argument for the religious hegemony of Sharia law has a certain logic. It almost certainly would be easier for fundamentalist believers to practice their religion freely in a homogenous society in which everyone believed — or was forced to act as though they believed — the same thing. But this logic is anathema to the whole idea of religious freedom.

It also presumes that the faith of the fundamentalist hegemonists is extremely fragile. Worse than that, it nurtures and reinforces this fragility — ensuring that their faith is a flimsy hothouse flower that cannot survive in the outdoor climate of a pluralist society.

This same logic is at work here in America. The more overtly religious "defenders of marriage" argue this explicitly, but it is also implicit in the supposedly secular "sociological" argument against same-sex marriage.

The real motive at work here, I suspect, has far less to do with any actual or perceived threat to the "institution of marriage" than it does with the terrifying suspicion that their own fundamentalist faith is too flimsy to survive in a pluralist public square. Their faith is so weak, so fragile, that the mere existence of other viewpoints — and the public acknowledgment of them — is as frightening as the idea of "gay people paratrooping in to occupy the vestry." Such timid faith can only be exercised freely under the canopy of legally established religion.