For the latest entry in my continuing series on the slow and very painful demise of marriage exclusivity, and the increasingly depressing nature of exclusivists, I'd like to focus today on one of the dwindling rationales behind exclusivity that makes our friends over there so difficult to talk to these days.
Bob Cesca posted this today about a gay-bashing [ahem] documentary entitled "Light Wins: How to Overcome the Criminalization of Christianity."
The criminalization of Christianity. Good lord (no pun intended).
As Bob writes:
[T]he most popular Christian conservative argument against marriage equality and indeed all issues of LGBT equality is that the government is stripping Christians of their religious freedom — freedom to think [that] homosexuality is an abomination and to not provide equal access to gay people. On the surface it seems really clever to accuse the government of being intolerant of religion in aid of being tolerant to marriage equality.
(emphasis added). The emphasis is added to highlight what I think the whole exclusivist movement (if one could call it that) is all about, be it religion-based, homophobia-based, ignorance-of-how-the-law-works-based, or otherwise.
It's about thought control.
In my previous diary I quoted a commenter from this Mediate thread who basically recited the exclusivist mantra perfectly: Marriage should be reserved for straights alone because gays don't deserve it. They haven't earned it, they can't earn it, and they're just trying to bully the rest of us into giving it to them.
But the point that Bob's article raises, particularly with respect to those poor persecuted Christians who fear they'll no longer be allowed to hate whomever their imaginary friend wants them to hate, or to believe the myths and superstitions and Bronze Age fairy-tales they've scrubbed into their brains, is that maintaining exclusivity really is about nothing more than controlling how people think and feel about marriage, children, family and so forth. Just a sampling, from the same commenter:
The word "marriage" is important to preserve for heterosexuals because it communicates that which is unique and special about their unions, and helps to presrve [sic] the natural family of husband and wife, mother and father...
You're the one fighting to make sure that the union of husband and wife is not considered special and unique from any other.
[D]o you think it's a good thing for children to be raised to believe that they do not need a relationship with both the man and woman who created them?
...mothers and fathers, husbands and wives, will no longer be the social norm....
I believe gender matters, that a husband is someone a wife has (and vice versa), that mothers and fathers are NOT interchangeable, and that children need both. ... [Same-sex] marriage is the expression of a different idea...
If marriage is understood as the bringing together of the two opposite genders, then homosexual unions are not a marriage.
[T]he infertile (who don't always know they're infertile, but can always adopt) and the elderly (one half of whom can still procreate) are allowed to marry because they serve to reaffirm marriage as the union between one man and one woman.
Proponents of homosexual marriage never answer straight (no pun intended) questions like do you believe the ideal for a child is a married mom and dad, or if you don't, which parent would you get rid of?
[Same-sex couples] don't need marriage, as they don't even carry the potential of
procreating, and don't reaffirm marriage as a union between a man and a
woman.
[T]he traditional understanding of marriage is rooted in the biological fact that it takes the bringing together of the two halves of humanity for the purpose of creating the next generation ... and attaching children to their MOTHER AND FATHER ... [Reserving civil marriage exclusively for straights] is nether a form of discrimination nor a denial of liberty and justice toward any other union that falls outside of that purpose or capability.
A definition communicates the essence or description of a specific thing or idea. It does not do so for the purpose of exclusion out of a sense of animus toward anyone or anything but for the purpose of illumination. Marriage has "always been" understood as the union of a man and a woman for a reason, specifically: heterosexual sex makes babies...
Homosexuals [therefore] don't deserve the title of marriage.
(emphasis added)
It goes on and on like this in various iterations. Note the highlighted words. It's all about "communicating" things and "illuminating" things and "reaffirming" things and the "expression" of things and the "understanding" of things and what things are "understood" to be or "considered" to be and what people do or don't "believe" about things. There doesn't appear to be anything more at stake than that.
This and other exclusivists are concerned about how people think and feel about marriage, children, family, &c., and how they will or might think and feel about those things once civil marriage is no longer a "title" reserved exclusively for them. They want marriage reserved exclusively for straights, because if it isn't, then other people might have thoughts and ideas that make exclusivists uncomfortable. They've therefore demanded that the states reaffirm their singular awesomeness by keeping The Gays in their place, and that their "definition" and "understanding" of What Marriage Is™ be the only one permitted and that everyone be compelled by law to accept that without question ... and they're the ones being "bullied."
These oppressed and persecuted Christians are having their thoughts, ideas and beliefs, and their personal confidence therein, challenged by secular society, in an unprecedented way, and they're having none of it. Not only do they not want to reexamine those beliefs or the importance thereof -- let alone the practical real-world consequences thereof -- they don't want anyone else to do that either. They don't want anyone to have thoughts that they themselves find unpleasant. But millions of people have thoughts that differ from theirs. Therefore they feel persecuted, because for some reason they think that being entitled to one's own thoughts means being entitled to have the rest of the world think the same thoughts and not be allowed, let alone encouraged, to think different thoughts.
I'm kind of surprised that exclusivists, particularly the more libertarian-minded among them, don't get this. How people subjectively think and feel about things like marriage, family, relationships, gender roles, posterity &c., is an area that the state should really stay out of (it doesn't always, but it should). They're the sorts of things that in a free society we want to leave up to the individual, not the state. If we don't want the state telling us whether, when, how, why, or who to marry, or whether, when or why to have children and how many children we can (or must) have, then we shouldn't be using the power of the state to reflect or promote anyone's individual subjective, abstract thoughts and feelings about things like this.
But that's what exclusivists are saying the states should do. They want the states to "affirm" and "strengthen" certain thoughts, ideas and beliefs, including the belief that opposite-sex unions are "unique" and "special." Which is "precisely what they may not do."