Gay marriage bans are faith flexing its muscles
Gay marriage bans are faith flexing its muscles
BY NEIL STEINBERG nsteinberg@suntimes.com May 13, 2012 10:48PM
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.................Opposition to gay marriage is a religious scruple. And on that level, I accept it. Follow your faith, reject any gay marriages you might be tempted to enter into. I’m with you. It’s a free country.
However ... it being a free country for you means that it’s a free country for others, too. Shocking, I know. Not only for people who are gay, but for straight people who don’t subscribe to your view of faith. People who realize that our culture’s steady march toward recognizing traditional subhumans as actual individuals with rights, starting with women, then blacks, then people with disabilities, is finally coming around to homosexuals.
And while your faith screams that this is bad, there’s still nothing in the fact-based world to justify trying impose your view on non-believers. Rep. Joe Walsh, if you recall, made one of the more popular lunges: claiming that gays make bad parents. That isn’t true. But even if it were true — are we now not letting people marry based on what kind of parents they’d be? Because meth addicts and senior citizens can marry. Deflating one false argument only leads to the next. Not worse parents? How about tradition? The marriage-is-unchanged-for-millennia argument is also popular, also untrue, and a particularly laughable stab at reasoning. You wouldn’t accept that logic from your doctor. “Calm down — leeches are a medical tradition going back centuries!” You want tradition? Buy a butter churn.
I believe most people opposing gay marriage are not bigots — they’re just immersed in their own insular worlds and don’t know any better. As I sat in that small house in Skokie, the thought grew: If only those religious folk could see this family living, reading, loving, praying, tickling together, they wouldn’t try to set their faith as a stumbling block before them. That’s inhuman, and it’s changing. Many religious folks have made the leap; the rest will. Or they’ll die off and their kids will. Like science, like most things, religion can be put to good or bad uses. It is our servant, it’ll do what we like, though lots of people pretend it’s the other way around.
the rest:
http://www.suntimes.com/news/steinberg/12508743-452/gay-marriage-bans-are-faith-flexing-its-muscles.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
If someoone in the government, or elsewhere, was trying to say that all houses of worship would be required to allow same sex marriages, I would have to strongly object to that. We (at least thos of us here) know that is not the case, however.
No one is saying that any religion has to accept it, or any person has to approve of it, for that matter.
But those who do not accept or approve should not be in a position to prevent those of us who do accept and approve from participating.
I am a straight, actively religious woman, and I do not understand from what DOMA is defending marriage!
