attempt at secularly analyzing gay marriage

This post will focus on analyzing this article, which is an article by the LDS church supporting ammendments in California and other states defining marriage as between a man and a woman. Because I believe the article makes an admirable attempt at being secular, and because my viewpoint, as confused as it is, has always been secular on this issue, I'm going to try to deconstruct this secularly without really talking about religion. That said, I am LDS, so this topic is confusing and close to heart for me, and my best friend is gay and hoping to marry and have children with her girlfriend, but struggling also with religious implications, so I have a very clear window into either side of the issue. For my religious conscious, I will pray about this article, but for my intellect and civil opinion, I will analyze it.

Okay. So my view before I read this article was that civil marriage between gay couples had no conflict with religion. I believed that the choice to allow gay marriage within its own walls and within its own members was wholly the choice of the church, but that the right to the civil definitions of marriage was wholly a legal, not a religious, right. I know that there is occasionally a bleeding between morality and legality, since it is safe to assume that a lot of laws are at least superficially based on moral codes (and I think that people can't really argue that that is at least partially true), and I know that even our forefathers like Jefferson who wrote the letter to the Danbury Baptist Church, a letter I have read, had a lot of overlap between state and religion going on (there is the argument that ceremonial deism, like having "in God we trust" on the currency, proves that we don't really have a separation of church in state; but I think that falls into the difference between religion and morality, because when currency was first designed, I think the belief in God was fairly universal, and the differentiation came in further details). But I believe that while today there is mostly a consensus on some fashion of universal morality, there is no consensus on the details that dictate religion, and the differentiations between religions in a country that is united by a single legal code make it obvious that overlapping religion and state (although not necessarily morality and state, because they really are different in our country at least) is a bad plan. And I think that churches for the most part know that, and I know the LDS church knows that So gay marriage was a prettty clearly legal issue to me before I read this article. Let the government recognize the civil marriage, and let the church define the religious marriage. It preserves the individual moralities unique to particular religions, and it also preserves the separation between church and state. However, reading the article has confused things a bit for me. Perhaps they are not as black and white as I was hoping.

So I'm just going to go through the major points of the article and try to de-jumble my thoughts. The article starts of pretty religiously by explaining the LDS church's opinion, but I believe it continues to try to argue a more logical rather than moral approach. The first interesting point that I think it brings up is child development's necessity for gender diferentiation in parents. They cite a few people, but I'm sure, given the debate going on today, that it would be equally easy to find experts arguing the other side as well, so I don't think the quotes really help the argument much. However, while I have thought about this point before, I confess I hadn't thought about it much since I viewed this issue as so strictly an issue of legal rights. Perhaps, though, it is useful to think about social implications, as this article does.

I think that obvious arguments against this are just individual differences between every person and every couple that makes some kind of rule of obvious gender roles in marriage pretty hazy. In some marriages, the father works, and it some the mother works, and in some the mother is the stoic less emotional one, and in some the mother is, and those kinds of immediate differences I think are available in people of the same sex too. However, I admit that there is a biological difference between men and women that is the general rule in most cases. There are some apparent personality differences that come from both the biological addition of the genes on that different chromosome, and in the societal climate of gender (which is slightly degenerating, but there are still some pretty clear gender divisions in society). So I concede that it's probably true that having parents of both chromosomes is necessary, if not biologically, at least in society today. A lot of that depends, though, on incomplete reserach and evidence of the balance between nurture and nature. So while any kind of evidence supporting this point in the article is incomplete, it is at least a valid possibility that the point is true.

Also, along the lines of social problems, I'm a very strong believer in a close family being integral to changing the dissintegration pattern of love in today's world. I think the best way to change the filth in the world is to strengthen the family. In a society that makes it difficult now, and will probably always make it difficult, considering people's strong opinions, for a family with two parents of the same sex to have all of the benefits of stability that the traditional family has, it makes sense to me that families based on this crumbling ground, through probably no fault of their own but more just the nature of people and society, may start out with more problems in familial stability. Not to say those can't be surmounted, but in a world in which we are quickly losing so much, it may not be fair to bring a child into that kind of tumultuous situation, all religious ideas concerning that set aside. It may not seem fair to deny people legal rights just based on the fact that they are discriminated against the way African Americans were once discriminated against, and the ability to raise children may seem like a basic human right, but I don't really have a strong opinion on that, and I'm just remarking about the need for familial stability in this day and age that may not come from that.

It also seemed like the article was not suggesting that any other legal rights be denied same-sex couples. I'm not sure of all of the extra rights that come with marriage as opposed to just being a couple, but it seems like this issue these days is a big more on the grounds of the rights of same-sex couples to the recognition that their relationship has the same value as a heterosexual relationship. And while the government can grant them that piece of paper, I don't think it will change any of the people that have always been against this's minds, and thus maybe there isn't that much of a difference between the already provided rights and that extra piece of paper.

The most interesting thing I thought the article said, though, was that legalizing same-sex marriage would actually detereorate separation of church and state rather than uphold it. I didn't really see that coming, and I find it intriguing. They talk about religious organizations like adoption agencies and schools being forced to adopt children into same-sex families or provide housing for same-sex couples, and I agree that this kind of legislation is just another way of the government stepping over that line between church and state. While not allowing gay marriage legally because of the moral opinion of churches seems a violation of church and state to me, this is a different issue. This is the issue of not allowing gay marriage not because of some unique moral opinion of churches (although that is obviously part of it for the LDS and many other churches), but rather because doing so would provide more of a deterioration of religious and legal freedom than not doing it. *That* to me, seems like the most valid secular argument this article, or any church, could make. I don't think it's right for the government to force religious organizations to follow the legal definition of marriage, and doing so violates my very reason for believing that gay marriage should be allowed in the first place (ie that it is entirely a legal and not a religious matter). So I really think that this is the most valid point this article makes, and it is an argument that has no plea to the moral opinions of the LDS church, just to the rights of any church to practice freely, and it makes me understand more, whereas I didn't before, why my church, a church that believes in separation of church and state, is opposing a seemingly solely legal ruling.

I am not quite as convinced by the argument in this article about changing school curriculum. That doesn't seem to be an infringement on the right of religion at all. Let schools teach that homosexual marriages deserve all of the same respect as heterosexual marriages. That doesn't seem to be any different from what the article was earlier advocating in the form of tolerance. That doesn't mean that parents can't teach their children that it's morally wrong. School teaches kids that it's legally perfectly fine to smoke when you are eighteen (even if it may be stupid) and drink alcohol when you are 21, and drink caffeine like coffee or tea throughout. The school teaches that it's legal to have sex when you are in high school, that it's okay, just as long as you use contraception. It would be wrong for the school to teach any differently, because then they would be teaching a moral opinion instead of a legal fact. So while the LDS parents can teach their kids not to drink alcohol or caffeine or smoke or have premarital sex ever, it's not an infringement or wrong at all for the school to teach that these things are legally permissable. It wouldn't really be any different in schools taught that same-sex marriage was legally permissable. So this argument doesn't really convince me at all.

Ok, so that's my secular opinion of this article. As I am caught between a lot of confusing ideas, I don't really have a moral opinion at the moment, but I can at least assess the arguments the church makes that are clearly logical rather than spiritual arguments, since my logic concerning this issue can't really get confused the way my spiritual opinion can, fortunately (I guess). So I couldn't tell you what my moral opinion of this article, this is my secular opinion.

Honestly, every time I see the agony my best friend is going through (she was raised Baptist, raised to believe it's wrong to be gay, and her family is still very much of that opinion), I just thank God that I'm not gay, or that I don't think I'm gay (whichever it is), becuase I have no idea how I would deal with that.