I’m passingly familiar with the (Abrahamic) religious objections to marriage equality. Are there any that aren’t based in religion, other than appeals to “tradition” which in the U.S. is, in this context, religion by another name?
(I could have sworn I’ve seen a thread on this, but if there was one, no one’s posted to it since May 2009.)
If you hear one, let me know.
I don’t think there are any that aren’t just redressed religion (tradition! procreation!), or related to / dependent on very outdated psychology/science (it’s an illness! bad for society! not natural!).
There’s no way a secular argument could exist, I think. Take God out of the equation, and suddenly it’s natural.
Yes. For an example, read the article Sex and Consequences by anthropologist Peter Wood in the July 28, 2003 issue of The American Conservative.
For those of us whose subscriptions have lapsed, can you summarize?
Here’s three that needn’t mention religion. They’re all awful, but people make them.
Marriage is for procreation.
Teh gay is Unnatural. (Not sure that this can really done absent religion entirely, but you could do a bad impression of a Deist talking about Natural Law, which isn’t really Abrahamic.)
Ewwwwwww!
As I say, they’re horrible arguments, and don’t try to convince me that they’re unsound because I agree. But they don’t rely on Deuteronomy.
There’s a fairly desperate attempt on the part of some conservatives to say that we shouldn’t redefine words so readily. Changing “marriage” is an “assault on the language.” It would, for instance, make lots of references in literature (Dickens, Hawthorne, etc.) difficult for schoolchildren to understand. (“What does ‘wife’ mean?”) Whatever.
It’s an Angstrom-thin fig-leaf for bigotry.
(And, advances in civil rights have already changed the language. You don’t hear much talk about “mulattoes” these days. And kids in school are already wondering what the big deal about “bastardy” was.)
No need. It’s right here and quite short. Why he didn’t link to it himself, I couldn’t begin to guess. In case you are interested in the life and work of Peter Wood, he is President of NAS. No, not the National Academy of Sciences, NAS.
To this I would add:
“Husband” and “wife” are separate roles that can only be played by a man and a woman, respectively, and both are necessary for a marriage. A marriage between two people of the same sex would be like a baseball team with two pitchers and no catcher (or vice versa).
People can’t really fall deeply in love with someone of the same sex as themselves, or feel about each other the way a man and a woman who love each other do. Gays who want to marry each other can’t be marrying for love; so it isn’t a real marriage, and they’re just trying to game the system somehow.
Needless to say, these arguments (if you can call them that) are based on faulty premises. But I believe that they are, consciously or unconsciously, behind the thinking of at least some of those who oppose same-sex marriage—and there’s nothing necessarily religious about them.
I just read Peter Woods’ essay. It is… unconvincing. To find negative analogies to show gay marriage having a negative effect on societies, he has to go pretty far afield, and the “social breakdown” he laments was underway well before gay marriage became a national issue in the U.S.
As far as I can tell, the basic argument is that gay marriage isn’t at all like ritual, mandatory same-sex relationships between teenage boys and adult men in tribes like the Etoro in New Guinea, but still, that’s the sort of thing that happens if you normalize male homosexual relationships.
Well, he presents it as if it were an argument, and it doesn’t reference religion.
This might be not exactly on-topic, but my understanding is that the rampant homophobia in Russia is largely secular, with the so-called “demographic problem” (i.e. the very low birth rate) often being cited as the reason. The resurgent Orthodox church is certainly involved, but isn’t the driving force. Laws against homosexuality also existed and were strongly enforced during the (ostensibly completely secular) Soviet era. Much like Soviet antisemitism, it was undoubtedly somewhat influenced by lingering religious attitudes, but was more a way to target the so-called “decadent” classes.
So there may not be a good “rational” secular reason for homophobia, but it would be wrong to say that all homophobia is religiously-motivated, at least worldwide.
Ah, yes, there were Communist arguments about homosexuality being a symptom of bourgeois depravity. As far as I can tell, the Russian Revolution legalized homosexuality, and that remained the case in the original, Lenin-era Soviet constitution. The situation changed under Stalin, though, and many other Communist parties followed the same line, including most Maoist parties, as well. The (Maoist) Revolutionary Communist Party of the US, for example, finally got around to conceding that homosexuality wasn’t a decadent behavior in 2000 or so.
It might help to examine other taboo laws. Are there any secular reasons for outlawing incest, sodomy (in places), bestiality, necrophilia (with permission), etc., etc. ?
All these things are basically just the “ew” argument, aren’t they? As society’s mores change, so will their laws. Gay sex isn’t really ‘ew’ any more.
Except for sodomy, not really. There’s sanitation/disease in the case of bestiality/necrophilia, the problem of consent with animals, and incest & necrophilia have variations of the problem of finding a “consenting adult”; most people aren’t interested in incest, and I bet that finding someone willing to donate their body as a sex object would be a tad difficult.
Could I get paid before I die?
I don’t have the links handy, but a few of the LGTBQ people from my law school were posting articles opposed to your prez’s gay marriage announcements. The argument is something to the effect of–if I understood it correctly–by normalizing all two-adult cohabitation arrangements, you’re simply stigmatizing a whole bunch of people all over again where there’s 3+ in the relationship, or people who otherwise choose to swing, or be single. In other words, gay couples are turning on their own community in a bid for nuclear family normalcy.
That’s not my view, and these were old Facebook posts so I can’t find them. It definitely read like some of the academic “queer theory” I would have read in my time in the humanities, so I’m sure it’s not a one off angry blog. It’s interesting if nothing else because I usually hear folks from the other side say, “Well, if you let gays marry, why not have polygamy?” And this is what that came off as from first glance, as well.