You Don’t Have To Like #MarriageEquality to See That It’s Right

Now that the Supreme Court has ruled that same-sex couples throughout America have the right to get married, it’s time to confront the inevitable backlash that has already begun to erupt: From homophobes complaining that their civil liberties are being curbed in the media to pseudo-scientists who insist same-sex marriage is bad for children, there are plenty of people out there who refuse to see the light on this issue.

Here is a convenient listicle to deal with them:

Back in 2012, a conservative think tank known as the Heritage Foundation paid $785,000 to an anti-LGBT sociologist named Dr. Mark Regnerus. Why? Because, according to their own mission statement, they desperately needed to produce a study that would “back up claims that same-sex marriage is actually bad for the family.”

This reminds me of a quote from the famous Sherlock Holmes story “A Scandal in Bohemia,” reproduced below:

“It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgment.”

Of course, the difference between the detectives in a Sir Arthur Conan Doyle mystery and the propagandists at the Heritage Foundation is that the former were only dealing with innocent errors in judgment; the latter, on the other hand, made a deliberate effort to deprive innocent men and women of their basic rights. Even though the overwhelming majority of research has found that gay parents are no less qualified to raise children than their heterosexual counterparts, the Heritage Foundation decided to validate the prejudices of its supporters by handsomely rewarding any scholar unscrupulous enough to use pseudo-science as a substitute for the actual thing.

The chief lesson here: If you can’t win an argument without cheating, you deserve to lose.

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Frankly, I’ve never understood this one. Whenever I discuss the issue of gay marriage with conservative friends, I usually hear some variation of the argument, “If homosexuals are allowed to marry, it will ruin marriage for everyone else!”

Um …. How exactly? How exactly will a marriage in the post-Obergefell v. Hodges era be any different from the unions that occurred before it? The closest equivalent to a straightforward answer has come from the State of Mississippi, which is threatening to pull all state-issued marriage licenses in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s recent decision. Their position seems to be that, by taking the state out of the institution of marriage altogether and leaving it entirely to the churches, it will allow Mississippians whose religious beliefs lead them to oppose same-sex unions to avoid having to implicitly support them.

On the one hand, I actually see a little merit in this argument. If we’re going to treat marriage as a fundamentally religious ritual, then it seems fine for the state to stay out of the matter altogether. Of course, this won’t actually prevent gay marriages from happening (plenty of churches and synagogues are willing to wed same-sex couples), but it will comfort those who feel their religious beliefs are being disrespected by the actions of Kennedy et al. Then again, if other conservative states follow in Mississippi’s lead, the traditional state-sponsored institution of marriage will have been changed as a result of their actions, not that of those homosexuals who choose to get married. Throughout American history, marriage has been as much a secular institution as it has been a religious one, which is why any pair of consenting opposite-sex adults have been able to go to local government institutions and declare themselves to be in wedlock. Simply extending that right to same-sex adults doesn’t change the experience of opposite-sex couples; revoking state-sponsored marriages, meanwhile, absolutely does.

Much has already been written about Justice Anthony Kennedy’s heroism in breaking from the Supreme Court’s conservative majority to grant marriage rights to same-sex couples (including by me), so I was reluctant to quote him again for this article. Then again, as I searched for the language to explain how opposing marriage equality is always an intolerant position, I could find no better way of expressing that thought then by returning to the judge’s immortal language:

That, as they say, is the bottom line. You can personally believe that same-sex marriage is wrong, choose to only attend churches that refuse to perform that ceremony, and even refuse to endorse it through your business (as Patrick Stewart pointed out when he defended a Christian bakery’s decision to not bake a cake with a pro-gay marriage message). At the same time, when you argue that the American state should actively prevent same-sex couples from getting married, you aren’t simply expressing your personal religious or philosophical opinion; you are demanding that that point-of-view be imposed on those who don’t agree with it. Everyone has the right to their prejudices, but they shouldn’t be shielded from the fact that those views are prejudiced, and they definitely shouldn’t be allowed to demean those who are targeted by their prejudiced by denying them the same rights guaranteed to all other citizens.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why good people support #MarriageEquality.