Evangelicals Concerned Inc.
“Leaving out the Lord” by Joel Belz, World, February 28, 2004. “Multiple Choice,” by Andree Seu, World, March 13, 2004. “A Marriage Made in History?” by Don Browning and Elizabeth Marquardt, The New York Times, March 9, 2004.
by Dr. Ralph Blair
We’ve already lost the debate” over marriage for gay couples. This is the conclusion of the publisher of the Religious Right’s World magazine. While continuing to advocate for a U. S. Constitutional amendment to ban marriage for gay couples – he signed the full-page newspaper ad in that effort in February – Joel Belz is not optimistic. He explains: “It is too late because even most Americans who want to restrict ‘marriage’ to heterosexual couples do so for the wrong reasons.” Granting that a polls approach (which “will change. And … not in our direction”) and appeals to “experience of five or six millennia” hark back to the very same arguments that “were used half a century ago to defend blatant racism,” he admits: “we should be embarrassed to use them now.” Belz says that “traditionalists [who] play the ‘children’ card,” overlook the fact that “we are a society already saturated with single parents regularly depriving their children of another parent of the opposite sex.”
Accordingly, Belz contends that the only legitimate refutation of marriage for same-sex couples is that “God’s design” is against it – an argument he might have acknowledged, but doesn’t, fueled the anti-interracial marriage issue of an earlier day. Interracial marriage was against state laws as late as the mid-1960s. In 1967, such marriages were legalized by the U. S. Supreme Court – branded an “activist court” and despised, then as now, for watching out for equal rights for all Americans. Belz concludes that, since our citizenry is not “ready to listen to God Himself … I think we’ve already lost the debate.”
“Leaving out the Lord” is an ironic title for a lament about a failed attempt to “do unto others” as Belz and friends most assuredly don’t want the others “to do unto [them].” In fact, one of their main arguments against marriage for gay couples is that it would demean or otherwise damage their own marriages (as though they don’t demean and damage their own marriages without any input from gay folk). One leaves out the Lord when one forgets that the Lord is present in the person in need on the margins, the oppressed, the “alien” and even “the least” among their neighbors. So just who is “leaving out the Lord?”
Andree Seu, with flippant reference to “choice” in sexual orientation, smirks her way through yet another of her many such attacks on people who no more choose their sexual orientation than she does. This time she poses at pushing polygamy. She begins by announcing: “Next time I get married it’s going to be to two people” and she ends by saying: “Me, my only problem is deciding: Do I want to marry two men, two women, or one of each?” She clutters her column with snide irrelevancies, e.g. on Dr. Kevorkian, “household plumbing,” and wedding-gift toasters. All of this, of course, is supposed to be hilarious. And to her readers on the Religious Right, perhaps it is. If IM-ing them, she’d no doubt expect LOLOLOLOL in reply. But sadly, about those who wish only for the right to have what she and other heterosexuals cherish for themselves – some supportive stability for a committed relationship with one beloved person – she is ignorant and insensitive. She and her cohorts get neither what homosexuality is about nor what the Golden Rule is about.
Remarkably, one of those cohorts, Southern Baptist activist Richard Land, reports that he has “not seen any issue that mobilizes my constituency like same-sex marriage, not even the abortion issue.” Is he saying that his people really get more worked up over trying to prevent a few gay couples from having some legal stability than they do over trying to prevent the slaughter (as they themselves see it) of millions of pre-born babies? Where are they coming from?
The Religious Right, of course, has no monopoly on antigay rhetoric. Some who would abhor identification as Fundamentalists are just as fundamentally oppressive to gay people – in spite of their attempt at some fairness. In their Op-Ed piece, Browning (emeritus divinity professor at the University of Chicago) and Marquardt (affiliate at the neo-conservative Institute for American Values) pretend that “alternative ways” will do for gay couples – the old “separate but equal” rationalization.
They oppose marriage for gay couples because they claim “there are no rigorous, large-scale studies on the effect of same-sex marriage on the couples’ children.” Do they wish to argue from silence? There are, indisputably, such studies (and sad experience) on the very bad effects of divorce on children – Marquardt fancies herself an expert on this. But they’re not pushing for a ban on divorce. There are also studies on the very bad effects on children living under abusively broken marriages that don’t involve divorce. Again, they’re not pushing for forced divorce in such cases. And, of course, there are all sorts of detrimental arrangements that impact the lives of children living with one or both heterosexual parents, live-in boyfriends, etc. Where is their call for a ban on heterosexual marriage? Their shot-gun opposition to all marriages between homosexual couples, qua homosexual, is overkill.
Browning and Marquardt complain that legalizing marriage for same-sex couples “changes the definition of marriage, reducing it primarily to an affectionate sexual relationship accompanied by a declaration of commitment.” But isn’t this why heterosexual get married? And don’t gay couples do this already? Browning and Marquardt refuse to see that all couples, whether gender discordant or concordant, need the support afforded by society, family and friends – and (though it’s not a part of law) even by their religious institutions. Anything less is less than family-friendly.