more on gay marriage......

ok, so the new yorker is taking much of the mm's flack these days....this time...the baylor lariet is putting out liberal commentary as yet unknown to baptist doctrine..............

COMMENT
WEDDED BLITZ
Issue of 2004-03-15
Posted 2004-03-08
The deliberations of the editorial board of the Baylor Lariat do not normally attract widespread notice beyond the environs of Waco, Texas—or within them, for that matter—but these are not normal times, and the Lariat’s editorial the other Friday was not, in the opinion of some, a sufficiently normal editorial. After summarizing the events surrounding the current fuss over same-gender matrimony, the Lariat editors stated their view. “Gay couples should be granted the same equal rights to legal marriage as heterosexual couples,” they wrote. “Like many heterosexual couples,” they went on to conclude,

many gay couples share deep bonds of love, some so strong they’ve persevered years of discrimination for their choice to co-habitate with and date one another. Just as it isn’t fair to discriminate against someone for their skin color, heritage or religious beliefs, it isn’t fair to discriminate against someone for their sexual orientation. Shouldn’t gay couples be allowed to enjoy the benefits and happiness of marriage, too?


(This, by the way, was followed by a boldface tagline: editorial board vote: 5-2. Wouldn’t it be nice if the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal practiced this sort of transparency?)

The Baylor Lariat is the campus newspaper of Baylor University. Baylor, with fourteen thousand students, describes itself as “the oldest institution of higher learning in the state and the largest Baptist university in the world,” and is a bastion of Christian conservatism.

The unchristian kind, too, apparently. The president of Baylor, Robert B. Sloan, Jr., quickly lowered the boom. “Espousing in a Baylor publication a view that is so out of touch with traditional Christian teachings is not only unwelcome, it comes dangerously close to violating University policy, as published in the Student Handbook, prohibiting the advocacy of any understandings of sexuality that are contrary to biblical teaching,” President Sloan stated, adding darkly, “The Student Publications Board will be addressing this matter with the Lariat staff as soon as possible.” Sure enough, that same day, the Student Publications Board—which evidently functions in the Baylor context the way the Ideology Department of the Communist Party used to function in the Soviet context—announced that the Lariat had indeed violated “policy” and assured the world that “the guidelines have been reviewed with the Lariat staff, so that they will be able to avoid this error in the future.”

It was no great surprise that the Lariat’s foray into dissidence was promptly squelched. What was startling was that such a foray, in such a place, was ventured at all. It was more startling, in its way, than the pro-gay-marriage ruling of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, three weeks earlier. Waco, after all, is far from Boston. And the vote in the Supreme Judicial Court was narrower—4-3, not 5-2.

The Lariat fracas is a small part of a large drama, but it is emblematic of an essential feature of the gay-marriage debate: the most salient divisions are not religious, political, or “cultural” but generational. To talk to younger people is to realize that for most of them, including many young conservatives, such notions as the idea that homosexuality is shameful, that it is a voluntary and/or contagious “life-style choice,” or that it is some sort of threat to something or other (public order, the family, civilization, God) are simply bizarre curios from the past, like the belief that masturbation causes blindness. And, for what it’s worth, anecdotal impressions are confirmed by opinion research. One particularly striking CBS News/New York Times poll, taken last year, asked respondents if they would favor or oppose “a law that would allow homosexual couples to marry, giving them the same legal rights as other married couples.” Among adults under age thirty, 61 per cent said they would favor such a law and 35 per cent said they would oppose it; among sixty-five-year-olds and up, 18 per cent were in favor and 73 per cent opposed. The numbers vary from poll to poll, but the huge age gap is always there.

The trend lines are clear: at some point in the fairly near future—maybe by the time those twenty-somethings are forty-somethings—gay marriage will be routine. (So will gay divorce, if the experience of straight marriage is any guide.) As for the legal status of homosexual unions, we are smack in the middle of a period of creative chaos. Family law has always been messy in this country, with marriages that are lawful in one state being unlawful in the next. Now it’s just messier. Some legislatures are passing laws forbidding gay marriage, others are experimenting with civil unions, still others are doing both; mayors, in acts of what might be called civic disobedience, are presiding at gay weddings; courts are issuing dicta for every taste. Last week, it was the turn of New York State’s crackerjack attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, who threaded the needle deftly by announcing that while it remains illegal for gays to get married in New York, gay marriages performed legally elsewhere are legal here, too.

There is ferment aplenty. But none of it exceeds the tolerances of America’s ramshackle federal mechanism. When divisions are rampant, passions on all sides are high, and no one on any side is suffering any palpable harm, the natural—and not necessarily reprehensible—inclination of politicians is to straddle. That is what Senator Kerry has been doing, and until recently it was what President Bush had been doing, too. But then the President’s poll numbers dropped, and his religious-right base—unsatiated, apparently, by the Administration’s record of crippling stem-cell research, packing the courts with troglodytes, funding “faith-based” services, and defunding family planning—grew restive.

The best that can be said for Bush’s sudden call for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage is that, on some level, he seems ashamed of it. He went to the Roosevelt Room, delivered his prepared statement, and left without taking questions. The Times reported that “White House officials” thought that the President appeared uncomfortable. Vice-President Cheney, whose beloved daughter is openly gay, said stoically a few days later that he will support his President, but he could not quite bring himself to say that he thinks the amendment itself is a good idea.

It is close to a certainty that no such amendment will be adopted. There simply aren’t enough people who see gay marriage as a sufficiently dire threat to “the welfare of children,” “the stability of society,” and “the most fundamental institution of civilization” (the President’s words) so that writing bigotry into the Constitution itself is urgently required. Bush probably doesn’t believe that, and Cheney certainly doesn’t. They’re just trying to win an election, and they figure that the end justifies the means. We’ll learn in November whether their ploy was successful. Either way, the question posed in all sweet innocence by the student editors of the Baylor Lariat will remain: Shouldn’t gay couples be allowed to enjoy the benefits and happiness of marriage, too?

— Hendrik Hertzberg


ironically, the gay folk that i know personally claim to have no interest in marriage........however, after a recent jolt to status quo, i am certain that their level of commitment is every bit as solid as those married 15 + years..........