I don't mean to offend. This isn't the first time I've vocalized this complaint, but it might be the first time I've done it publicly. You see, my battle to defend marriage has caused some wounds caused by friendly fire sometimes.
My biggest problem are with arguments that hijack marriage
into some war against homosexuality, with unseemly obeisance to the
conservative v liberal political mosh pit of colloquial news. I, personally, have no
such need to make such a war. I only want to defend families, the needs
and responsibilities that children have claim on from their parents, and
the needs and responsibilities that the wife and husband have on each
other.
Arguments which frame marriage as defending it against homosexualists,
liberals, communists, etc.. are not unwarranted. And they might have
some use in helping people who see the world in such terms to
immediately grasp onto ready-made villains and heroes. There may be very legitimate pursuits to engage in on those fronts. And because of
that I can tolerate them to a large degree, but not graciously. But therein lies how such arguments suffer from an even more intrinsic problem…
Ask anyone before the year 2000 A.D. (or even 1900A.D.) what “marriage equality” means, and they’ll
tell you an answer. They won’t complain that the term hasn’t been made
up yet because SSM hasn’t become a public dialog.
Yet argument narrowed to the vision of current cultural wars seem to act as if these things only sprang into existence when marriage was threatened to be neutered. When one only sees the arguments and phrases defined by the treats, then like a
guerrilla fighter one becomes narrowly fixed on how enemies are
working the field. One's focus instead turns to the economics of simply hoping to delay and molest them in their endeavors, inadvertently ceding your most valuable territory to them.
Marriage equality is not a something only understood in the context of SSM. Nor is it valuable only in the context of SSM. Nor should the term be considered pariah because of how enemies use it.
Marriage equality is how we govern the political unit of a family, with integration and equality between the man and the woman.
Gender integration is at least as valuable to a marriage as it is to
racial integration in education. In fact, marriage is the oldest
institution of integration there is.
A true understanding of equality and integration re-enforces the
value of marriage, and compels us to not neuter its definition. It isn’t
their territory in some war between left and right. Its marriage’s
territory, always has and it always should be.
Great post! Thanks for all you do!
ReplyDeleteYes, but...
ReplyDeleteThere is a legitimate argument in not accepting the concept of "gay rights" based on identity politics. The problem stems from same sex attraction (a private matter) to homosexual behavior (still a private matter) to gay identity and gay politics (a public matter). If gay activists can convince the population that there is such thing a a protected class status (under the 14th Amendment) based solely on the self-identified ideology of public concerns for private actions, then we must, in turn, argue against the legal classification of "gay" as an unprovable and untenable class.
Such an argument is not directly related to SSM, but does seem to "attack" gays, if only to deny protected class status, not based on identifiable attributes such as race or gender, but on an ideology.