Contra Human Events #4: Mandating Equality, and Townhall.com on the Objective Harm of Gay Marriage

Nothing boils up the blood quite so nicely as a read through Human Events, or its partner in evil, Townhall.com. Then again, it could be my fever (still).

No, it was the websites.

Ever so rarely, opposition to gay marriage rises above the level of name-calling and discourses on Deuteronomy/Leviticus, to address the question of whether gay marriage is actually bad in an objectively cognizable fashion. I’m pleased to see that people are willing to rise above bigotry to discuss the merits. But even then, Townhall.com gets it wrong. Marriage, the author argues, is about raising children, not about solemnizing love, and gay marriage is bad for children, since children need a mother and a father. The author claims that that’s something even liberals can get behind.

Maybe some liberals would find that compelling, if they haven’t thought the matter through. First, if marriage is about childrearing, restricting marriage to heterosexual couples is not narrowly tailored to that objective. It’s both underinclusive, in that it fails to support those gay couples that seek marriage to raise children, and overinclusive, in that it supports those straight couples that get married just because they love each other, and don’t intend to raise children. That justification – which bases part of its logic on the argument that children need married parents – inexplicably harms the children of gay couples who would get married, thus bringing about the very evil it purports to protect

Second, arguments like this are only logical if one assumes, before beginning, that children need to be raised by a mother and a father as defined by biological sex, and that any heterosexual mother/father couple is preferable to any homosexual couple. That assumption ought to fail on its face. The comparison to Norway, in an attempt to prove this point, is inapt: different culture means different results.

Next we have Human Events arguing that legalizing gay marriage will force employers and institutions to not only tolerate but also support gay marriage, since they’ll be legally obligated to grant spousal benefits to all married employees, gay or straight.

Right. So? While one certainly ought not be fired for expressing their viewpoints against a particular political or social issue in their capacity as a private citizen, part of the liberty one loses when joining a civilization is the liberty to discriminate against one’s employees. Using the economy and employment as a tool to oppress has the effect of potentially “freezing out” those members of society undesirable to the majority, creating the kind of caste system that can never exist in a putative democracy. What seems like private action, then, is a systemic problem that, if we truly believe that gay men and women are equal, must be solved.

This fact is often hard to handle. When restaurants were desegregated in the mid-20th century, some fought it, violently: for example, Lester Maddox of Atlanta (seen in the picture to the right, all the way on the right), wielded an ax-handle and a pistol (look closely at his hand in that picture) to fight off African-Americans who just wanted to eat at his restaurant. Maddox missed the same point then that Human Events misses now: the personal cost of living in a civil society is that one sometimes has to deal politely in the public sphere with people you don’t like. The majority doesn’t get the right to use economic power to create a caste system, and those that try to do so will, like Maddox, be remembered in time as the bigoted, hate-filled monsters that they truly were.

When equal protection rules change, employment rules change. While this may be another thing for conservatives not to like about extending gay rights, it was also something they didn’t like when civil rights expanded to protect African-Americans and women. But they learned to deal with it. If we as a society come to realize, as we should, that there is no just cause to think less of gay men and women, they’ll have to deal with this too. When it comes to civil rights, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one.