At the press conference today, President Obama, asked about same-sex marriage, responded:
With respect to the issue of whether gays and lesbians should be able to get married, I’ve spoken about this recently. As I’ve said, my feelings about this are constantly evolving. I struggle with this. I have friends, I have people who work for me, who are in powerful, strong, long-lasting gay or lesbian unions. And they are extraordinary people, and this is something that means a lot to them and they care deeply about. At this point, what I’ve said is, is that my baseline is a strong civil union that provides them the protections and the legal rights that married couples have. And I think — and I think that’s the right thing to do. But I recognize that from their perspective it is not enough, and I think is something that we’re going to continue to debate and I personally am going to continue to wrestle with going forward.
Obama’s right — from the perspective of out same-sex couples in the US today, it’s not enough. As long as lesbian and gay people are free but not equal, they and their allies will be agitating for equality.
Which makes me wonder: How do the opponents of same-sex marriage hope this debate will end?
Here’s how I hope the debate will end:
Eventually, as the most anti-SSM demographic dies off and as each new generation is more pro-SSM than the previous generation, SSM will become part of marriage norms throughout the United States. State by state, SSM will be legalized, until sometime around when it’s legal in 30 or 35 states the Supreme Court will end the issue once and for all and SSM will be legal everywhere in the USA.
And as the sky fails to fall — as people do not start marrying their dogs/siblings/parents/whatever, as heterosexuals don’t give up on marriage, and as the words “father” and “mother’ aren’t outlawed, and so on — the arguments against SSM will cease to be mainstream.
Those folks who were against SSM out of a sincere but mistaken desire to protect marriage will give up on opposing SSM; there are plenty of other marriage related issues to take up their time, after all. (Truthfully, they’ll be relieved to not have to argue about SSM anymore). Those folks who were against SSM because, in their hearts, they just plain didn’t like lesbian and gay people will become irrelevant to mainstream debate.
In other words, it’ll be a lot like the “should homosexuality be legal” debate from the 1980s — once the issue is settled in favor of freedom and equality, it’ll cease being a mainstream controversy.
Fifty years from now, it’ll seem very strange that this issue was once a big deal, and we’ll all be angry at each other over whatever the big issue will be then (equality for clones? Illegal space alien immigration?).
So that’s how I hope the debate concludes, and except for the bit about space aliens and clones, it’s fairly realistic.
But what realistic end are the folks opposed to SSM hoping for?
Do they think lesbian, gay and bi people are going to go away? Accept permanent second-class status for their families? Do they hope, like Robert George, that all homosexuals will choose to be celibate, or find happiness in heterosexual marriages? None of those outcomes seem even remotely plausible to me.
But what are they hoping will happen?
I don’t know about clones and aliens, but equality for human-intelligence AI is certainly going to be an issue at some point, probably in our lifetimes. Still, I wonder how having movies -already made- about that issue might change things. We’re anticipating it a little.
And yeah, as for the anti-SSM folks, I’m a little terrified of looking into the dark and peculiar place from which they derive their logic.
Clones are perfectly possible. They’re known as “twins”. Artificial clones are probably possible too but there are these laws and ethical considerations. The ethical considerations aren’t the ones you’re thinking though: cloning from an adult somatic cell creates an animal (human or otherwise) that is in some ways already biologically “old” at birth and will have a limited lifespan. Not what we want for our kids.
Back to the original subject, my vision of how this all ends is as follows: I see my grandchildren looking at me funny when I tell them about the days when people couldn’t get married just because they were the same gender. I picture the most historically aware one saying, “But society’d already been through ‘separate but equal’ with minorities and it didn’t work. So how could anyone possibly think that it would work for gays?” The others just shake their heads and are thankful that they didn’t live in those dark days.
In other words, I expect this problem to be solved in the next decade or two. I expect people to be so thoroughly convinced that they “forget” that they ever opposed the idea.
The alternative is ugly. Because gays won’t go back in the closet on their own but might get shoved back in. Backlash does happen and it might here. I don’t know how that would play out if it happened. I’m sure it would be very interesting.
My guess? The right wing will hope that the granting of civil unions will lessen the equality gap enough that gay and lesbian people will no longer possess the political capital to fight for changing it. For gay rights advocates, it’ll be a lot harder to foment change and to capture the interest of the public, if they’ve actually got all of the functional attributes of marriage except the word “marriage.”
This may work; there are plenty of historical examples. Civil rights: the closer we get to equality, and the more laws that are passed to try to ensure equality, the less interest people have to show up to marches. Or, take the wage gap” in order to capture the interest of the public, the gap needs to be large. There’s no way that congress would even consider (much less pass) wage gap legislation if the gap were 4%. As a short term measure, it would arguably benefit women to have the wage gap LARGER, not SMALLER, as it would help get support for new legislation.
And don’t forget that the right wing doesn’t seem to be dying off or losing power. I prefer your predicted outcome, but I’m not so sure I think it will happen.
I truly believe that anti SSM hope that eventually they will elect enough representatives and will overturn all the legislative and judicial progress that has been made on GLTB issues. I think their aim is for all homosexual behavior to be illegal and, like a few other countries, make it punishable by imprisonment or death. I also suspect that if science happens to discover a way to predict homosexuality during an amnio, that all these lovely people who call abortion murder, will try to pass laws that require the test for the homosexual gene set, womb environment or whatever be performed and then either force those children to be aborted due to “deformity” or sexually mutilated (clitoral circumcision and removal of testes) to thwart the unclean behavior . I may be paranoid, but I do believe that the only logical extension of the SSM opponents is the elimination of what they consider and abomination.
But what are they hoping will happen?
That their kids will be heterosexual.
Obama is using weasel words. Cuz he’s a weasel.
I hope the marriage equality struggle ends soon with a Supreme Court decision overturning California’s amendment banning same sex marriage, forcing the repeal of similar amendments across the country.
As for the debate, it will never end. We are still arguing about Affirmative Action nearly 50 years after Jim Crow. (Yeah, not perfectly analogous, but still….)
The most strident opponents of SSM are probably hoping that it’ll end when they all get Raptured away and all us evil sinners will see they were right all along.
The way I wish it would end:
1. gays & lesbians get civil union rights in all states that are identical (at both the state and federal levels) to civil marriage rights.
2. het people sue to get into civil unions.
3. after a large majority of hets choose civil unions, the state governments drop the cumbersome two-tier system and issue only civil union licences for everyone.
Won’t happen this way in the US, though, because so many of us like a little religion in our government (despite what those pretty 18th-century documents say). I think we’ll have a hodgepodge of strange and uncomplimentary laws between states for years until the social norms have changed so much that the supremes have to step in and unify the system. It took an entire generation between the time that California changed its anti miscegenation laws and the US supreme court decided Loving vs. Virginia (1948-1967). Yeah, society moves faster now, but I don’t think that we’re going to get a unified position on this for a decade.
Secretly? They’re hoping that science finds the causal factor(s) for homosexuality and gay people become an interesting fact of history.
<iThey’re hoping that science finds the causal factor(s) for homosexuality and gay people become an interesting fact of history.
Why would a lead to b? All current evidence is that sexuality (homo-, hetero-, bi- or other) is primarily genetically linked. Probably a multi-gene trait. And we’ve yet to eliminate any genetic variants, including deadly ones like Huntington’s, through deliberate use of genetic information. So either they’re dreaming or they’re planning something…bad.
Why would a lead to b? All current evidence is that sexuality (homo-, hetero-, bi- or other) is primarily genetically linked. Probably a multi-gene trait. And we’ve yet to eliminate any genetic variants, including deadly ones like Huntington’s, through deliberate use of genetic information. So either they’re dreaming or they’re planning something…bad.
A certain part of the anti SSM crowd believe in creationism and that Noah’s arc was real. A little detail like not being able to identify the specific genes that “cause” homosexuality or other non-heteronormanativity won’t stop them from dreaming that they can eliminate anyone whose sexuality they don’t like with a flick of a wand. The fact that it is unlikely to happen doesn’t necessarily count.
I didn’t say their hope was logical.
I think Robert’s right, on one level. I’ve actually heard a right-winger claim that Andrew Sullivan’s opposition to abortion stems from his fear that they will someday figure out a prenatal test for gayness, and start aborting the gay fetuses.
In the real world, I expect that the opponents will make enough noise to prevent the civil union compromise.
More states will recognize same-sex marriage. At some point, it will just seem absurd to continue to oppose same-sex marriage.
How would they square this with their oft-stated belief that being gay is a choice rather than genetic?
—Myca
Myca: Same way they square it with all the other logical inconsistencies: By refusing to admit that it exists.
I’d go a step further than Robert and say that an awful lot of them would prefer there end up a law mandating capital punishment for homosexuality. The only objection a lot of them have to people like Phelps is that he’s insufficiently jingoistic, not that he hates gay people too much. It’s not even all that much of a secret, either. Many of them openly praise the countries that have those laws.
Myca: See 12.
Sign that the anti-gay marriage is losing: Sensible conservatives like Robert have abandoned it.
Gay marriage is not important. What is important is that Christianity must always acknowledge that homosexuality is a sin.
Any attempt to retcon that causes Christians to stray from the righteous path.