So Much to Which to Object

You may or may not believe this, but I'm tired of thinking, writing, caring about issues surrounding homosexuality. When I began doing so a few years ago, it was predominantly as an intellectual question; Andrew Sullivan dragged me in, essentially, with his dubious argumentation in response to Stanley Kurtz. Nonetheless, I'm working on a related major project at the moment (you'll see), and then I intend to write out my comprehensive stance.

For that reason, I'm not going to address fellow Rhode Island blogger Marc Comtois's "treatise" on the subject comprehensively. Many of his points are where the argument begins, and I'm too in the thick of it to backtrack at this moment in time. However, I do want to note one point that he makes:

I believe that the proponents of gay marriage have needlessly approached this from an antagonistic angle. They have essentially attempted to ram this idea down the throats of the public. Most Americans are tolerant. They don't really care, but if their cherished institutions, as they define them, whether historically accurate or not, are perceived to be under attack, they will resist.

It isn't just on the basis of the institution of marriage that people ought to be offended. In San Francisco, for example, the mayor and some hundreds of homosexuals have given the finger (in Rush Limbaugh's words) to anybody who's concerned about the rule of law (as if the Mass. court didn't do that more extensively, if less dramatically). As the AP report notes, this is not yet another instance of wacky West Coast behavior that the rest of us can laugh off:

Around the country, gays and lesbians emboldened by San Francisco's move and by the constitutional debate over gay marriage in Massachusetts went to courthouses Thursday and Friday demanding their own marriage licenses - and getting summarily rejected, since every state in the nation bans gay marriage.

Personally, I'm not laughing at much of anything related to this topic today. The Providence Journal has taken its relentless advocacy for gay marriage to the next level. Here's part of a letter to the editor from Richard A. Matera (Providence) that ran today:

If the courts are saying that all couples, regardless of who they are, are entitled to the rights of marriage granted by the state, then the religious ceremony should be separated from the civil. This would preserve marriage as defined by religious groups while opening it up to everyone. (It would mean that those having a relious ceremony would also need a civil ceremony.)

Marc suggests some version of this, but Mr. Matera cuts right to the fatal flaw in Marc's more-reasonable approach: this movement is subversive to its core. There are no two ways about it. In order to force affirmation of a minority lifestyle, homosexual activists and utopianist dictator-in-a-bottle liberals will push culturally established, nationally understood acceptance of religious ceremonies out of the public square. To liberate sex from the restraints of parenthood and responsibility, religion must go in the closet.

It wouldn't, apparently, be good enough to declare that homosexuals can be married by whoever will marry them, whether religious or secular; either the movement will seek to force churches and synagogs to perform the ceremonies, or they will, as Matera has suggested, seek to make religious ceremonies irrelevant in the civil sphere. That somebody as considerate, respectful of religion, and conservative as Marc has come darn close to the same solution shows how persuasive the argument could be.

In the more official capacity of a column, the Providence Journal gives voice to a bit of arrogant jeering from Brown anthropology professor William O. Beeman:

How will we know if a married couple is really a man and a woman? The answer is: We can't for sure!

Legislative attempts to restrict marriage are doomed to be ground to powder through repeated litigation in the courts because there is no clear, scientific and strict definition of "man" and "woman." There are millions of people with ambiguous gender in America -- many of them already married -- who render these absolute categories invalid.

In the few legal cases that have emerged in recent years it is clear that courts in different states are defining gender according to completely different criteria. Soon we will not only have different marriage laws in each state, but different gender-definition laws.

There are at least three ways one might try to codify gender under law -- biologically, psychologically and culturally. On close inspection, all of them fail.

And there you have it. Gay marriage has brought the most inane over-intellectualized academic relativism into mainstream thought. Beeman declares that the FMA would ultimately "falter" on the basis of one of the "thousands of existing marriages" in which one of the partners' biology conflicts with his or her genetic makeup. There are 290,342,554 people in the United States. Percentage-wise, those "thousands" barely register. And Beeman believes this "should worry all Americans"? I find the fact that people like Mr. Beeman have access to young minds and mainstream column inches to be far more worrying.

How perfectly Beeman's thinking illustrates the relationship between the corrosive nature of the exception and the tyranny of the minority! The exception is made to invalidate the applicability of the rule to social construction, and a legal principle emphasizing equality forces the claims of the majority to the fringes of the law. The institutional bulwarks of Western civilization — the very standards, practices, and tacit ethics that have enabled our society to accomplish what it has — are to be trampled for the sake of an intellectual joke! And who will drown in the wave of corruption and misery that will inevitably follow? Not Ivy League professors, that's for sure.

The determination to force the gay marriage change and the raw political power of the social elite in my region have left me discouraged, lately. But one doesn't have to look far to discover why the fight must be kept up, and the arrogance of that elite perhaps justifies hope that the great bulk of people, who just want these maddening issues to leave them alone, one way or another, will be snapped into the realization of what's at stake.

Folks like Andrew Sullivan and Jonathan Rauch make their "conservative case" for gay marriage persuasively. We cannot forget, however, that if we who oppose gay marriage lose the fight, Andrew and Jonathan aren't the ones who win.