I love living in Utah, but sometimes I don’t feel very Utahn. As laws prohibiting same sex marriage fail to pass Constitutional muster in various federal courts across the nation, my adopted state has vowed to fight the good fight for its version—to the tune of millions spent on lawyers arguing that current Utah law reflects the will of the people. Indeed.
Just in case the appeals court could not deduce the will of the people on its own, a veritable smorgasbord of churches put aside their differences and developed, with their own lawyers, a brief for the court explaining their religious conviction that marriage between a man and a woman, sanctified before God, “…is the right and best setting for bearing and raising children.” The religious argument then, is that this is all about protecting children.
“Ah!” I said when I read that. How novel! And here I was, thinking opposition to gay marriage reflected the religious right’s determination to punish gays for behavior they consider sinful by denying them equal protection under the law. I’m so relieved to be proven wrong – it’s all about the children!
So, um, what about the children? I mean, other than repeating religious dogma, does Utah’s argument contain empirical evidence supporting traditional marriage as the preeminent method for bearing and raising children? If it does, what are the policy implications beyond just prohibiting marriage? Do we intend to bar LGBT couples from bearing and raising children? Many choose to do so now don’t they? Is there evidence they do so poorly? Will we take away those children? Bar them from adopting?
Of course not! So what we are left with is the state’s attempt to deny these people the many legal, social, economic, and psychological benefits of being married to someone they love. And this protects children how?
Calling someone a bigot is harsh. Some Utahns against gay marriage react angrily when someone suggests that traditional Christians are acting like segregationists in the Jim Crow south here. Maybe teaming up with Southern Baptists wasn’t the smartest move if you wanted to avoid that comparison. But from my perspective, I don’t see that much difference between this legal fight and say, the fight against the decriminalization of interracial marriage in the 1960s. Virginians fought the good fight against interracial marriage then, as they are fighting along with Utahns and others now against same sex marriage.
Why don’t we just own our bigotry like the Duck Dynasty guy? That is, before he issued that soppy “I love all men and women” FB quote. He said that homosexuals will “…not inherit the Kingdom of Heaven,” and that, in general, blacks were happier under Jim Crow. Ba-Bam! At least you know where he stands. Why doesn’t the rest of the religious right do the same? Try this manifesto: Homosexuality is a sin before God! We will oppose any law or societal convention that makes it easier for those practicing this behavior to live, work, or otherwise lead normal lives, just like other religious fundamentalists in the Middle East, Africa, maybe Russia too.
But oops, we live in a republic. The majority does not always get to impose its will universally, thanks to the wisdom of our founding fathers, not when that majority seeks to deny the full privileges of citizenship to others for arbitrary reasons. Lord knows, so to speak, you are entitled to your beliefs on the godliness and heterosexual basis of marriage, but your right to impose them on others ought to stop at the door to your church. We Utahns are on the wrong side of history here.
Like Will Rogers said a long time ago, “if dogs don’t go to heaven I want to go where the dogs go.”
I’ve found that in general dogs are much nicer than most people, only bite if the bitten deserves it, and don’t tell lies or stories behind your back. They also take pretty good care of their kids, and don’t care what the parentage of another dog is, and long as it’s friendly.
Utah is a strange state full stop. Apart from the skiing and possibly hiking I’m not sure it is a place I’d want to go. I am not a bigot (far from it) but they have some odd laws out there all centered around religious dogma and a believe system I struggle with -but fine for them. I never did understand this attitude toward homosexuality. It is a fact of life. I have, over the years, particularly in my civilian days outside the military had many homosexual friends and they to a one were all great people, who weren’t “in your face.” They were who they were and carried on their lives, paid their taxes and minded their own business. In fact, I lived in a run down neighborhood and several Victorian homes in Hampton Va. They moved in and turned a blighted neighborhood upside down. It is now a preferable and charming place to live. I can give multiple examples in DC and Baltimore. The point is they ADD to society in so many ways like everyone else. I can also say from personal experience that many would make far better parents than some heterosexual couples I know. One last thing on adoption. Isn’t it better to have an unwanted, abandoned or otherwise neglected child adopted by a homosexual couple who provide a loving home? If we don’t not only allow them to adopt buor even encourage them to adopt, they’ll have their own children anyway (lots of ways as you know) and kids miss out. The whole argument is absurd on it’s face. I am not an enemy of religion, but over the past 20 years in particular I have seen what happens when so called “God” and to my mind primitive beliefe systems trump common human decency and reason. I know you have too Jeff. Why we are even having this discussion in the courts is an affront to common sense. CURB YOUR DOGMA!
Bravo Jeff for bringing it up.
Thanks Greg – great comments. Frankly, I fear the righteous and the cocksure wherever I find them, here or overseas. The recent goat rope in Arizona for example – the latest in a trend of using the Bill of Rights as justification for denying rights to others. Really scary. I feel a novel coming on about this!
Hi Jeff:
Thanks. I agree 100% with your premise and in the 21st century this kind of medieval thinking really does scare me. Living abroad though I find that maybe we Americans living in the US have entirely too much free time to discuss and worry about controlling other people. I can tell you I live in Greece. While the economy is on its ass and many don’t know where their next pay check is coming from there is surprising little crime in the normal sense and virtually NO (don’t care what they show you on TV about protests) no violent and random street crime. We also don’t live in a state where the police more or less terrorize the citizenry unlike the US where we have town police, county police, state police (the worst) and 17 different variations of Federal Police. Any or all of whom can detain and even incarcerate you for the least little offense. Not so here. One nearly never sees a police person and when one does they are generally pulled by the side of the road helping someone with a flat tire. I think the US populations is fed shit since birth about our country and how “free” we are and how “exceptional” we are. We are hypocritical at best. Our record of human rights is shit. I think we are ranking at 139 of 179 with a “medium risk” category worldwide. We have something on the order of 1.7M people incarcerated (the highest incarceration rate in the world) and now the statistics is that 1 in 15 men under 25 will have been incarcerated or arrested at some point in their lives. 1 in 100 are there now. Also the highest incarcertion rates fall to minorities. The prison system is an industry. Incarceration in most countries is NOT used as punishment but to keep the truly menacing off the streets. I know as I did a detailed study of it when I did my Masters in Law (International Criminal Justice)- now thats a book to consider. If you have any interest I will share with you something that I posted on a blog which I participated in which breaks down my thoughts on just how hypocritical the US is when it comes for example the Ukraine. You can also see a facebook post I put up on the request of folks who wanted my take on that. Think about that other subject though. There is a lot of meat on that bone and people now don’t trust the media or the government anymore and it might just be what folks who are thinkers want to consider. Remember though if you put out such a book you’ll have to upsticks and move out of the country as you will get a rectal exam from the IRS.
Hi Greg, I’m actually thinking of a work of fiction riffing somehow on how we are choosing the information we view. I’ve been slow to notice this, but lately I’ve started to jot down the names of the source material people quote from or post on FB. “The Right,” “Chicks on the Right,” sites of that ilk. There are plenty of liberal ones as well, but my FB friends trend conservative so I see less of those. What really strikes me is that people are not even making a pretense of objectivity. They only want to hear one perspective, their own, and they are really able to screen everything else from their consciousness. So I’m thinking of a sort of updated Brave New World, where the state isn’t telling us up is down or down is up, we tell ourselves – and we believe it. Are you still writing your blog? I’ve misplaced the link. Happy to post it on this site for my massive following of 27 people! Take Care, Jeff