HOMOPHOBIC RESISTANCE TO SAME-SEX MARRIAGE

The agitated opposition to same-sex marriage is partly the result of a fundamental(ist) misunderstanding. Ignorant people confuse “marriage” with the “Holy Matrimony” of Christian theology, which is for them a divine dispensation. The secularization of American society and communications media has contributed to this confusion by increasingly ignoring the religious phrase and substituting “marriage.” 

In reality, same-sex marriage is never even  mentioned in the Bible—much less prohibited.

Marriage is not “Holy Matrimony.” “Holy Matrimony” is a specifically Christian religious concept: Its defenders base their argument on the Christian Bible and on medieval Christianity’s theological definition of “Nature”—and on the manipulation of that definition so that many common animal (including human) behaviors could be classed as “unnatural,” as in the fantasized pseudo-biology books called “bestiaries,” written by medieval clerics. 

The theological concept, “Holy Matrimony,” is not shared by many other religions—not even all Christian churches admit “Holy Matri-mony” as a “sacrament”—and in the United States this religious concept (including the idea that a union between two people must be between only one man and one woman) cannot be imposed by some citizens on others without violating the First Amendment. 

And how can Christians forget that the Lord’s anointed King Solomon had 700 wives and 300 concubines? In the Holy Bible. Does that sound like “the traditional one-man, one-woman”  marriage touted by homophobic Christian fanatics?

Marriage (not “Holy Matrimony”) existed all over the world long before Christianity, and still exists outside Christianity, in order to ensure the orderly transfer of property—through an economic pact between two families which would include (but was not limited to) inheritance by children. That is why marriages have always required “dowries” and “bride-prices,” to guarantee economic solvency. 

In fact, these contracts were required among the Hebrews, from whom Christianity originated. Remember how Jacob in the Old Testament, had to buy his two wives, Leah and Rachel, from his father-in-law, Laban? And they were sisters. Sister-wives. In the Holy Bible. (They were also his cousins on his mother's side. Incest.) Does that sound like “the traditional one-man, one-woman” marriage of reactionary Christians?

Outside Islamic and Judaic theocracies, marriage (not “Holy Matrimony”) is a civil contract registered with and regulated by the state. It is, in effect, a kind of incorporation. That is why couples are required by law to go to a demographic registry and fill out a marriage license. They register with the state, which establishes by law who will possess the property that each brings to the marriage and the property that they acquire during the marriage.   

That is also why modern countries require not only a state-issued marriage license but also, if the marriage is dissolved, a civil divorce decree that, among other things, apportions the couple’s assets and assigns obligations, sometimes as established by law.

Furthermore, the fact that marriage is a civil contract is clearly shown in the prenuptial agreements that dispose of the couple’s property in the case of a dissolution of the marriage. They are contracts—modifications of the property distributions explicit and implicit in marriage contracts.

In summary, “marriage” is de facto a civil compact, a civil union; “holy matrimony” is a religious concept superimposed on it first by the medieval Church and now by reactionary Christians, and is the excuse that they and others use for depriving a hated minority of its civil right to form such unions.

One has to wonder at the virulence of homophobia today, in the face of the facts and of plain logic; after all, same-sex marriage is never even mentioned in the Bible—much less prohibited. 

But, aside from the way children and young people unthinkingly absorb the dominant attitudes around them, the explanation seems fairly simple: These people compulsively imagine homosexual couples engaged in coitus, revoltingly “nasty”—noisy, squishy, smelly, dirty—conveniently ignoring the fact that heterosexual coitus is equally “nasty.”  

It explains their obsessive use of the word “abomination” in its modern sense of something disgusting, although in repeating the word, today’s Bible merely preserves the Authorised (King James) Version’s 17^th-century translation of a Hebrew word that meant basically “ritually unclean: ineligible, under the law, to kill animals in the Temple, and burn them, and smear their blood around for the delectation of the Lord” —Not noisy? Not squishy? Not smelly? Not dirty?—Hebrew law also barred the “unclean” from a few other community activities as well.

This level of irrationality can hardly be persuaded away. The government will simply have to enforce the law, as it did with the civil-rights legislation of the 1960s and 1970s.  And GLBT people will have to continue to demonstrate that they are human beings who deserve respect.

HOMOPHOBIC RESISTANCE TO THE U. S. SUPREME COURT’S DECISION PROTECTING SAME-SEX MARRIAGE

The recent decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, to strike down State legislation outlawing same-sex marriage, was met with a spate of calls for resistance from politicians, clergymen, and civil servants—and produced a flurry of expressions of defiance and anti-gay sentiment from a number of florists, bakers, and hardware-store owners, most of them small—in some ways very small—businessmen. 

Much of this little controversy is based on an exaggerated sense of Us (good guys) versus Them (bad guys), something that appears to be evolutionary-instinctive, and in my experience correlates with the level of academic achievement: the less educated the person, the more rigid and narrow the identification with Us, and the more suspicion of, and hostility to, Them.

The fact that these people raise the false issue of “freedom of expression” shows their irrationality:

Their expressions of hatred and bigotry, the insulting labels like “abomination,” “deviant,” and “pervert” and “faggot” empower and encourage violence (even murder), marginalization, and denial of civil rights. If these expressions are not a threat to all civil rights, including the right to life itself, then how can the mere identification and condemnation of that hatred and bigotry be a threat to freedom of speech?

The so-called threat to “freedom of religion” is equally specious. Those who claim that their freedom of religion is threatened have one of two bases. First, the more confused think that if the civil rights of GLBT people are respected, then somehow, as if by magic, the “religious” rights of heterosexuals will disappear. This is patently absurd: no heterosexual marriages will fall apart as a result of a same-sex marriage, not even if the gay couple moves into the same neighborhood. The marriage of a same-sex couple will not invalidate Christian “Holy Matrimony” for anyone, anywhere.  (Nor will serving a gay customer cause heterosexual customers to be denied service.) This is the Chicken Little syndrome: In a traditional popular fable, Chicken Little ran around screaming that the sky was falling; he psychologically contaminated the entire community without being able to point to a single event. Maybe this was the inspiration for Chick-fil-A.  

The second group of “religious” objectors fears prosecution and fines and possibly even jail terms as a result of refusing service to GLBT. This fundamentalist Christian fear of prosecution/persecution is undoubtedly reinforced by the traditional stories, lovingly retold, of the persecution of the primitive Christians under the Roman Empire, and of the early Protestants by the Roman Catholic Church. So these people, who would persecute or even kill GLBT people, cast themselves (!) as the martyrs.

Today, their fears are apparently based on the penalties for the violation of the civil-rights legislation of the 1960's and '70's, which itself violated some fundamentalist Christians' belief in white supremacy. In case you don't believe me, here are some examples of racist theology: The Southern Baptist Convention, a large Christian denomination, was created on the eve of the American Civil War specifically in order to defend, biblically, the enslavement of Africans; and for more than a century after the war, it defended white supremacy and the oppression of African Americans. The Ku Klux Klan (which has many sympathizers to this day) is a perfect example of the religious belief in white supremacy and racial oppression, just as the Black Muslim belief that Allah created the Black Race (good guys), whereas Satan created the white race (bad guys, demons), is a perfect example of the contrary theology.

If the protection of GLBT people violates the religious freedom of fundamentalist Christians, then the civil-rights legislation of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations clearly violated white-supremacist religious freedom. And yet obedience to civil-rights legislation was enforced, through the courts and even through the deployment of the National Guard and the United States Marshals. But as far as I know at this time, only a handful of States have legislation that prescribes penalties for discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Certainly no such national legislation exists. So the threat of persecution—so deeply feared, so widely proclaimed by fundamentalist Christians—is illusory, a delusion.   

It will be difficult to root out the prejudice and hatred, mainly because their roots are so irrational and confused, so unrelated to any specific factual evidence. Our best hope is to continue the struggle with the passing of time and the coming of a new generation. 

[ The original version of the article appeared as my comment to http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cj-prince/why-i-support-no-gays-all_b_7710334.html?ncid=txtlnkusaolp00000592 ]