Deconstructing "Minnesota for Marriage"

The battle over marriage equality in Minnesota is heating up, and the anti-equality coalition Minnesota for Marriage has launched it's web site. I'd like to take a minute to go through some of their main talking points and deconstruct them. Under the section "Why Preserving Marriage Matters" is the following:

Many people mistakenly believe that proposals to allow so-called “same-sex” marriage are about allowing a new, different and separate form of marriage to coexist alongside traditional man/woman marriage. They envision it as a different expression of the same marriage institution they have always known. 

However, that is a fundamental misunderstanding of the legal issues involved in the debate, and with the proposed constitutional amendment in Minnesota. 

What is at stake in this debate are two competing definitions of marriage. One definition – advocated by gay “marriage” activists – would define marriage as the union of any two people regardless of gender, with the law treating the parties’ genders as irrelevant to the meaning of marriage. The other definition, contained in the proposed constitutional amendment and reflective of the collective understanding of virtually every nation throughout recorded history, is that marriage is the union of one man and one woman.

First of all, gotta love the typical scare quotes around marriage in the phrase "gay marriage". Because of course gay couples who have been married by a church (which in my mind is what really makes a marriage), lived together their entire lives, raised children together and built a family aren't really married, they're just pretending at best, mocking God at worst.

But on to the meat of the argument here, "generless marriage".  The anti-equality crowd loves to use this term because it seems to imply that if marriage equality is achieved all married couples will suddenly become androgynous, or maybe it's because it terrifies misogynists who can see their privileged role as "the man of the family" (i.e. the one who doesn't have to cook, clean, take care of kids etc.) slipping away along with antiquated gender roles. Either way the term is a bit disingenuous. I think gender-neutral would be a better term. What marriage equality will do is not make gender irrelevant so much as recognize that same-gender couples are equal to opposite-gender couples. And, as my Christian complementarian friends well know, equal doesn't necessarily mean the same (though I do think there are far more similarities than differences).

The page keeps up the "genderless marriage" meme further on.

Under the law, one definition of marriage would not exist alongside the other. Only one of the competing definitions of marriage would legally exist. As noted in a scholarly review published in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, “…once the judiciary or legislature adopts ‘the union of any two persons’ as the legal definition of civil marriage, that conception becomes the sole definitional basis for the only law-sanctioned marriage that any couple can enter, whether same-sex or man-woman. Therefore, legally sanctioned genderless marriage, rather than peacefully coexisting with the contemporary men-woman marriage institution, actually displaces and replaces it.”

This quote expresses essentially the same concerns as the one above. What I find interesting though is the fact that they fail to mention that the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy that they are citing is a decidedly conservative organization with a strong bias on this issue. And while I again take exception to the term "genderless marriage", I more or less agree with the idea stated.

Why has virtually every society throughout history defined marriage as the union of one man and one woman?

Gotta love this one. No matter how often the anti-equality folks are corrected on this idea, they just keep using it. The notion that "virtually every society throughout history defined marriage as the union of one man and one woman" is laughable. Not only has polygamy been the norm for much of history, but there actually are quite a few societies, though mostly tribal, who have recognized some form of same-sex marriage.

Protecting the interests of children is the primary reason that government regulates and licenses marriage in the first instance. After all, government does not license or regulate any other form of intimate relationship – not friendship, or dating, or cohabitation. People are free, under the law, to live as they choose, cohabitate with whomever they choose and engage in sexually intimate relationships with whomever they choose – all without any governmental recognition or regulation.

While the idea that "children [are] the primary reason that government regulates and licenses marriage in the first instance" is debatable, I think children certainly are an important component of marriage and marriage law. But what does this have to do with same-sex couples?

But marriage is a special relationship reserved exclusively for heterosexual unions because only the intimate relationship between men and women has the ability to produce children as a result of that sexual union.

Ah of course! Marriage is about children, and banning any marriage that couldn't or wouldn't produce them is totally the best way to protect the children! Of course we don't deny marriage licences to the elderly, infertile or those who refuse to have children. And of course same-sex couples are perfectly capable of adopting and caring for children (you know, the ones that heterosexuals have abandoned), but whatever.

Marriage serves a vital and universal societal purpose – to channel biological drive and sexual passion that might otherwise become socially destructive into enduring family units that have the best opportunity to ensure the care and education of any children produced by that biological drive and sexual passion.

I totally agree! Sex is powerful and potentially destructive. Heterosexual sex in particular carries the risk of pregnancy. And hey, homosexual sex has its own risks as well. We all, every one of us, do better in a society that encourages us to channel our sexuality into healthy and safe intimate relationships. And society does better as a whole when those relationships are strong and capable of caring for children. But yet again I'm left asking what this has to do with same-sex couples.

By encouraging men and women to marry, society helps ensure that children will be known by and cared for by their biological parents. Whenever a child is born, her mother will almost always be nearby. But the same cannot always be said of her father. Men, especially, are encouraged to take responsibility for their children through the institution of marriage. Marriage is society’s mechanism of increasing the likelihood that children will be born and raised by the two people responsible for bringing them into the world – their mother and father.

While I see what they are getting at here, and I certainly agree that absentee fathers (or mothers for that matter) are, in general, a bad thing, I have to wonder if the anti-equality crown realizes how offensive this idea is to so many. And no, I'm actually not talking about gay people here, I'm talking about those who are adopted or who have adopted. Are these families somehow inferior to "natural" families because they are not tied together by biology? What a slap in the face such rhetoric is to those from adopted families.

I would also like to point out that legally recognizing same-sex couples in no way, shape or form effects the stability of the heterosexual family unit. Are the authors trying to imply gay couples getting married somehow forces or encourages men to abandon their children? Or are they simply trying to demean gay couples by pointing out the fact that the formation of our families often involves adoption? That would demean adoption itself of course, but as I mentioned above it would seem that the authors have no problem with such rhetoric.

While death and divorce too often prevent it, the overwhelming body of social science evidence establishes that children do best when raised by their married mother and father. Simply stated, children need both a mother and a father. No matter one’s view of homosexual “marriage,” it is undeniable that every child born into a same-sex relationship is intentionally denied the love and affection of one of her biological parents.

Actually  "the overwhelming body of social science evidence" shows that children do better with two married parents. Yes for much of history that has de facto meant heterosexual couples, but the research that has been done on same-sex families shows that the children of those families fare just as well as, if not better than, the children of heterosexual families. This is why every major medical and mental health organization in the country supports marriage equality.

Fundamentally, same-sex marriage advocates propose to shift the marriage paradigm away from what definition of marriage is best for society – especially for children – and squarely onto the desires of the individual adults who seek to marry. Under a genderless definition of marriage, the interests of children – and therefore society’s intrinsic interest in marriage – is eliminated entirely. Only the wishes of the two adults in question matter.

This one is an oldie but a goody, the idea that marriage equality is essentially a selfish endeavor on the part of LGBT people that diminishes the importance of children in the marriage covenant. First off, given that the elderly and sterile can marry, I think we can all agree that the desires of adults already (and justifiably) play a significant role in marriage. Secondly this line of argumentation ignores the millions of same-sex couples who are de facto married (that is they live as a married couple) and raising children. For these couples one would imagine that marriage equality is just as much about strengthening the legal bond between them and their children as it is about the legal bond between them and their spouse. This raises a familiar question for me, if it really is all about the children for the anti-equality crowd, why do they seem to care so little for the legal fate of the millions of children being raised by same-sex couples?

When a court or a legislature adopts a genderless definition of marriage, legal experts warn (and actual experience from other states and countries confirms) that there will be profound consequences for society. Those people who refuse to accept this redefinition of marriage will be punished by the law. Churches and religious organizations can lose their tax exemptions and be forced to abandon their core moral principles or face punishment. Individuals, small businesses and groups will be subjected to lawsuits and regulatory action if they refuse to condone the “new” understanding of marriage. Perhaps most profoundly, children at a very young age will be taught in school that marriage is between any two adults, no matter what they have been taught at home, in church or in their ethnic traditions. Under the law, those who believe otherwise will be treated as the legal and moral equivalent of bigots.

First of all I would like to point out how incredibly ridiculous this whole line of reasoning is. I could make the same argument as a racist that these heterosexists are making. Do not anti-discrimination laws based in race make those who "refuse to accept [the] redefinition" of racial norms into bigots? Why is no one fretting over the legal rights of white supremacists who draw their values from the Bible (as virtually all racists did in the past) being trampled? Why is no one concerned that "children at a very young age will be taught" that all races are equal, "no matter what they have been taught at home, in church or in their ethnic traditions"? This whole argument is silly.

Nevertheless, even if it wasn't ridiculous, it is still misleading. There is absolutely no evidence or reason to believe that "[t]hose people who refuse to accept this redefinition of marriage will be punished by the law." Nor is there any reason to believe that, "[c]hurches and religious organizations can lose their tax exemptions and be forced to abandon their core moral principles or face punishment." Religious institutions and individuals have the right to free speech under the First Amendment and marriage equality won't change that. Don't want to perform same-sex marriages at your church? Then don't! And hell while your at it feel free to ban interracial marriages, interfaith marriages or whatever else you want. It's a free country and you are welcome to be as prejudiced and/or bigoted as you'd like. The only area in which an individuals personal opinion on this matter could possibly be an issue is in public office and public accommodation. If you run a business that is subject to anti-discrimination law then you probably won't be able to get away with discriminating against gay people. Sorry 'bout ya.

The only part of this with any grain of truth is the idea that "children at a very young age will be taught in school that marriage is between any two adults", and even that is a stretch. Certainly public schools would be required to treat all students and faculty equally, whether gay or straight. And as society further comes to accept gay people we will see more about them in our history books (just look at California). But so what? This just brings me back to what I said earlier about the rights of racists. If the anti-gay crowd has the right to ensure that their kids never hear anything (particularly anything positive) about gay people in public schools then do not racists have the same right? If I, using the Bible (or any other holy book) teach my children that God created all the races separately, meant for them to remain separate and even made some better than others, are my rights not being "violated" in exactly the same way as the heterosexists are when a public school teacher tells my children that actually all people are equal irrespective of race?

Finally I'd like to take a look at a claim made on their "The Threat to Marriage" page.

Right now, attempts are being made in Minnesota’s courts and in the Legislature to redefine marriage or eliminate it altogether. If activist judges or politicians were to succeed in redefining marriage in Minnesota in the future, there would be profound consequences for religious organizations, individuals, and small businesses—and for society itself.

This is just ridiculous. The Minnesota legislature already passed a bill banning same-sex marriage. The idea that the state is somehow on the precipice of being "forced" to accept marriage equality is laughable on its face to anyone aware of the situation there.

Further down that page there is a litany of misleading "consequences" of marriage equality that I will be looking at some other time, as this post has already gone on much longer than expected.

Love, Hate, With Conservatives Sometimes It's Hard To Tell The Difference

These days the LGBT rights movement has made enough headway that most anti-gay crusaders feel the need to at least pay lip service to tolerance by claiming they really do love homosexual (so much so that they're working day and night on a cure for us!). That's why I respect Rebecca Hageline, she espouses her animus towards gay people openly, honestly and without reservation. It is, in a perverse kind of way, a breath of fresh air.

For example Hageline, in a Washington Times piece about her visit to Australia, said the following (emphasis mine):

[M]arriage in Australia is under attack by homosexual activists who seek to shoehorn their lifestyle choices into a shoe that will never fit: marriage. They want the law - and public opinion - to redefine marriage to include homosexual sex as something good, the moral equivalent of marital sexuality expressed by a husband and a wife.

[...] 

History teaches that deviancy spurs decline, and the push to normalize homosexual relationships puts us on the fast track to disaster. But the bigger issue is what results when you fundamentally alter the basic building block of society. 

In my Australian speech, I warned that efforts to legitimize polygamy and pedophilia would follow in the wake of homosexual marriage.

[...] 

The fiction of homosexual marriage surely will erode the morals and stability of society. It’s happening not only on the national stage, but also at local levels in ways that will affect your family and your children. 

Schools will get their doses of homosexual-promoting curricula in California; as that state is one of the largest textbook purchasers, California’s curricular decisions will create ripple effects for publishers and school districts across the country. Middle school and high school students in every state will be exposed, under the guise of suicide prevention, to the testimonies of drag queens, transvestites and formerly drug-addicted, HIV-positive homosexuals encouraging confused teens to identify as LGBT, embrace “their” community, and reject the “bullying” of their concerned parents.

 Wow. Just wow. So gay people's relationships are not even remotely equal to straight people's, the recognition of our relationships will lead to legalized pedophilia and polygamy, gay marriages are "fiction", and all LGBT people from history are "drag queens, transvestites and formerly drug-addicted [and] HIV-positive". Awesome. Good to know what you really think about us Hageline.

Now here's my usual lesson for those on the traditionalist side of this debate. Drop the "we really really don't have anything against homosexuals!" line already. If you generally believe what Hageline does, i.e. that gay marriage is a mockery of the "real" thing, it's legal recognition will lead to legalized polygamy and pedophilia and gay people really just have a mental illness which causes many of them to end up "drug-addicted [and] HIV-positive", then please do everyone a favor and stop trying to hide your animus behind caveats of love. It is not love to believe, absent any real evidence, what this woman believes. It is not love to call an entire class of people mentally ill because they happen to fall in love with the "wrong" gender. It is not love to connect homosexuality to pedophilia. So if you believe as Hageline does then grow some balls and start acting like her. Espouse your views plainly and bluntly without trying to pretend that you don't hold animus and prejudice against the gay community.

Congratulations New Yorkers!

Today marks the first day that same-sex couples in New York can get married. Check out some photos and videos of the celebrations below.

Photos taken from Queerty and GoodAsYou posts (here, here and here).

Andrew Sullivan: Why Gay Marriage Is Good for Straight America

Andrew Sullivan has a poignant op-ed in Newsweek defending marriage equality.

You can have as many debates about gay marriage as you want, and over the last 22 years of campaigning for it, I’ve had my share. You can debate theology, and the divide between church and state, the issue of procreation, the red herring of polygamy, and on and on. But what it all really comes down to is the primary institution of love. The small percentage of people who are gay or lesbian were born, as all humans are, with the capacity to love and the need to be loved. These things, above everything, are what make life worth living. And unlike every other minority, almost all of us grew up among and part of the majority, in families where the highest form of that love was between our parents in marriage. To feel you will never know that, never feel that, is to experience a deep psychic wound that takes years to recover from. It is to become psychologically homeless. Which is why, I think, the concept of “coming out” is not quite right. It should really be called “coming home.”

In the end, I had to abandon my home in order to find it again and know the place for the first time. I left England just after my 21st birthday for America and its simple foundational promise: the pursuit of happiness. And I gave myself permission to pursue it. I will never forget the moment I first kissed another man; it was as if a black-and-white movie suddenly turned into color. I will never forget the first time I slept next to another man—or rather tried to sleep. Never for a moment did I actually feel or truly believe any of this was wrong, let alone an “intrinsic evil,” as my strict Catholicism told me that it was. It was so natural, so spontaneous, so joyous, it could no more be wrong than breathing. And as I experienced intimacy and love for the first time as an adult, all that brittleness of the gay adolescent, all that white-knuckled embarrassment, all those ruses and excuses and dark, deep depressions lifted. Yes, this was happiness. And America for me will always represent it.

 [...]

I still didn’t think it would ever happen to me. I thought I was too emotionally damaged, my emotions and sexuality severed by all those years of loneliness and arrested emotional development. I thought my heart had too much scar tissue, and I could live my life well enough with just friendship and occasional sexual encounters or dates. But when I first set eyes on my husband, I knew I had lucked out. Some things you simply know. And when we finally got married, a few years later, and our mothers walked us down the makeshift garden aisle, and my sister gave the reading through tears, and one of our beagles howled through the vows, and my father put his arms around me and hugged, I did not hear civilization crumble. I felt a wound being healed. It is a rare privilege to spend your adult life fighting for a right that was first dismissed as a joke, only finally to achieve it in six states and Washington, D.C. But how much rarer to actually stumble upon someone who could make it a reality. And to have it happen to me in my own lifetime! This joy is compounded, deepened, solidified by the knowledge that somewhere, someone just like I was as a kid will be able to look to the future now and not see darkness—but the possibility of love and home. That, I realized, was really what I had been fighting for for two decades: to heal the child I had once been—and the countless children in the present and future whose future deserved, needed, begged for a model of commitment and responsibility and love. 

And that is why it has been such a tragedy that conservatives decided this was a battle they were determined to fight against, an advance they were dedicated to reversing. It made no sense to me. Here was a minority asking for responsibility and commitment and integration. And conservatives were determined to keep them in isolation, stigmatized and kept on an embarrassing, unmentionable margin, where gays could be used to buttress the primacy of heterosexuality. We were for them merely a drop shadow for heterosexuality. What they could not see was that the conservative tradition of reform and inclusion, of social change through existing institutions, of the family and personal responsibility, all led inexorably toward civil marriage for gays.

Read the whole thing here.

Family Research Council Caught In Lie, Responds With More Lies

During Wednesday's DOMA repeal hearings Senator Al Franken called out Tom Minnery of Focus on the Family for misrepresenting a Health and Human Services study about family structure and children's health and well being. Well the Family Research Council wasn't too happy about that, and responded:

"Homosexual activists are gloating over an exchange Senator Al Franken (D-Minn.) had with Tom Minnery (of Focus on the Family affiliate CitizenLink) at yesterday's hearing on a bill to repeal the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). Minnery had cited a December 2010 federal study which showed that children raised in a "nuclear family" have better health outcomes. Franken, however, triumphantly noted that a 'nuclear family' was defined (in part) as one headed by 'two parents who are married to one another'--not two opposite-sex parents. But did Franken forget the law he wants to repeal? DOMA says, 'In determining the meaning of . . . any ruling, regulation, or interpretation of the various administrative bureaus and agencies of the United States , the word 'marriage' means only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife.' 

Since this was a federal study published by a federal agency based on a federal survey conducted by federal (Census Bureau) employees, its definition of 'married' is bound by DOMA. Even if, by chance, the interviewers or authors violated that law, the survey data was collected from 2001 to 2007. During that time (and only from mid-2004 on) there was only one state (Massachusetts) in which homosexual couples could 'marry.' The vast majority of homosexual couples raising children fall in the categories of 'unmarried biological or adoptive family,' 'blended family,' or 'cohabiting family'--all of which have poorer outcomes for children than the traditional 'nuclear family.'

 This would be a pretty good take down of Senator Franken, except that Debra Blackwell, lead author of the study, has said that Franken was correct:

" 'Sen. Franken is right,' the lead author of the study told POLITICO. The survey did not exclude same-sex couples, said Debra L. Blackwell, Ph.D., nor did it exclude them from the 'nuclear family' category provided their family met the study’s definition. 

The study’s definition of nuclear family is: 'one or more children living with two parents who are married to one another and are each biological or adoptive parents of all the children in the family.' 

That means the study does not provide evidence that straight couples’ children necessarily fare better than same-sex couples’ kids, as Minnery claimed."

The sad thing is that there is some grain of truth in what the FRC said about gay couples not being able to be married and thus not being counted. I'd imagine that there weren't remotely as many same-sex couples surveyed by the study as opposite-sex couples, and certainly not enough to make any concrete conclusions from the data. But this just points to the reality that children in families headed by same-sex couples are being disadvantaged by laws like DOMA and other anti-equality measures. I've said it before and I'll say it again, if these groups really cared about children and families they would want to ensure that all children in all families receive all the benefits of having two legally married parents.

Lies in the Name of God are Still Lies (And Probably Worse...)

Sociological research is a tricky thing. It relies heavily on statistics, which can be notoriously unreliable, and can often be spun any way we want. Case in point, Focus on the Family, along with several other anti-gay groups, routinely cites a Health and Human Services study to claim that children do much better with a mother and father then with two fathers or two mothers. During today's hearings on the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act Senator Al Franken took FotF's Tom Minnery to task over their misuse of that study.

As a Christian I find it particularly egregious that these supposedly moral, Christian organizations would blatantly lie and deceive in order to further their agenda. They are welcome to their opinions, and they're welcome to make the best case possible for those opinions. But lying, even for sake of maintaining "Biblical morality", is still lying.

What's worse is that this isn't an isolated instance. These groups have repeatedly used studies comparing single mothers with married parents to conclude that children being raised by same-sex female couples are harmed by not having a man around. Zack Ford over at ThinkProgress has a good post explaining why Focus on the Family’s ‘Fatherless’ studies are irrelevant to DOMA.

There is a reason God calls us to honesty, deception ruins our credibility and can destroy our witness. As Senator Franken put it, “I frankly don’t really know how we can trust the rest of your testimony if you are reading studies this way.”

"Won't Somebody Please Think of the Children!"

During today's Defense of Marriage Act hearings Tom Minnery was forced to admit that DOMA harms the children of same-sex couples.

Somehow this reminded me of The Simpson's Helen Lovejoy:

I think this is the crux of the marriage equality debate. Gay people are living their lives and forming families whether groups like Focus on the Family like it or not. Given that many of these families have children, the question becomes one of priorities for FotF and others. Do they care more about winning the marriage fight or protecting all children in all families?