Sweet reason and pouring oil on troubles waters: making sense of the SSM debate(s)

After several years of point and counter-point in the exalted comments section of Rod Dreher's blog at The American Conservative, probably the most diverse comment section on the web, it seems time to distil a coherent summary of what I actually believe to be true about homosexuality, discrimination, the Constitution of the United States of America, marriage, and other tangentially related stuff.

Clearly, I don't take this debate as seriously as some people do. Its a thing, but its not an essential thing. What any person is entitled to is what Justice Louis Brandeis called "the right to be left alone." That is not a right of gays and lesbians, or of Christians, or of any demographic sub-category, however you want to slice the pie of humanity. It is a right that adheres to each individual, and therefore to individual choices of activity shared with consenting adults. Within that universal right, there is room for people with same-sex attraction to act accordingly without the police barging in, and rightly so.

As a heterodox Christian, I also think that columnist James Watkins is probably correct in surmising that the marriage of a male and a female reunites the image of God, and the union of two men, or two women, or for that matter, one man and more than one woman, or one woman and more than one man, simply does not. Is this important to the civil law? Not particularly, but its a perfectly valid religious precept. It is civilly binding on nobody, but it may be true.

Anecdotal evidence is of limited use in proving a hypothesis to be true, but it can be quite sufficient to disprove a hypothesis. For example: "Homosexuality is a choice." One person who can credibly recount that they felt "gay" from an early age, from the onset of puberty, or in pre-pubescent ways even before puberty, disproves the hypotheses. Anecdotal evidence can disprove the scope asserted by the word "all." Likewise, the assertion that ALL homosexuality is inborn, genetic, fundamental to a person's being, can be disproved by one credible anecdote of a person who became homosexual in orientation at a later point in life, or due to some traumatic experience, not to mention those who have gone back and forth, or have been actively gay for many years, then found that when motivated to do so, for whatever reason, they were able to revert to stable, comfortable, fulfilled, heterosexuality.

So there is no reason to believe anyone who makes any universal statement characterizing exactly what homosexuality IS. We don't really know, and those who wave the banner of "science" from any point of view have always turned out to have a predisposition, something they earnestly wanted to prove. Presto! Those who denounce homosexuality publish papers "proving" their prejudice, and those who extoll it as healthy and normative publish papers which "prove" their prejudice with equal fervor, and equal credibility.

So, civilly speaking, is there any sound constitutional or legal reason to discriminate against individuals who are, or say they are, or may be, or seem to act as if they are, gay? Not much. If someone tried to enforce the equal employment opportunity right of a gay man to be employed as a prostitute at a legal brothel in Nevada, the management would have a sound case to object that this is NOT what customers are paying for. (Unless there were SEGREGATED brothels catering to different orientations... which there may well be, I haven't been looking into it.) But that is an outlier. It is one of the few cases where precisely the way a gay individual is DIFFERENT is highly relevant.

There was a cute post card some twenty years ago sarcastically debunking the notion of "The Gay Lifestyle." It had humorous references to "Watch them as they shop for the week's groceries, wash their car on Saturday, mow the lawn, get up and go to work Monday morning... Good points all. Whatever it is that makes "gay people" different from "the rest of us," in all these respects and most others, they do the same things the same way. So no, there is no basis for discrimination. The fact that "I don't like homos" is irrelevant as a matter of law, and commerce, in particular, is subject to legal regulation. The fact that someone is gay, or may be gay, is irrelevant. The point is, everyone is entitled to participate in civic life and commerce without inquiry or consideration of whether they are or aren't.

Does that mean that churches may not discriminate against gay people? Actually, a church, or any religious body, can exclude anyone they want to, for being gay, or Catholic, or Protestant, or having red hair, or wearing pants, or eating pork, for any reason or no reason, rational or irrational. That's fundamental to the First Amendment. For the federal or state government to intervene in what a church may or may not accept or reject would be both an Establishment of Religion, and an infringement of the Free Exercise thereof.

Further, the First Amendment has been expounded for close to 150 years to protect churches from any judicial review into matters of faith and doctrine. It simply is none of the government's business to even inquire, much less to declare, what a church does believe, or may believe, or shall believe, or teach. Most of that jurisprudence was neatly summarized by the Tenth Circuit court of appeals a few years ago.

Thus, there is NO basis whatsoever in our constitutional framework to impose any restriction on a religious body (church, mosque, synagogue, ashram, temple, etc.) teaching, e.g., that homosexual acts are sinful, contrary to the will of God, harmful to a human being's immortal soul, or whatever. They can preach it, teach it, proclaim it, and endeavor by patient witness to win others to accept and practice what the church teaches. Nobody has to accept it, or even listen to it.

So then we come to the rather more specific debate about same-sex couples marrying. Perhaps the most concise argument in favor is "I see an expression of the same longing for the connection that redeems an animal instinct into a living out of love and commitment." (One John Spragge contributed that to Dreher's blog). On its face, that's beautiful, and very convincing. It is true, sexuality is a set of hormonal animal instincts, and human cultural institutions have tried to encase it in meaning. In human history, that has included love and devotion, it has also included arranging diplomatic alliances, forging business alliances, etc.

But there is a significant difference between the right to be left alone, to work out the intimate details of your own life, to participate fully in civic responsibilities, on the one hand, and a claim to the honor, applause, acclaim, approbation, of the entire community, on the other.

The claim that "equal protection of the laws" constitutionally MANDATES that a state issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples rests on many flawed assumptions. One can frame the debate "Shall the state deny gay people the right to marry?" One can equally well frame the debate "Does the bond that unites a same-sex couple constitute a marriage?" Since either question is equally valid, the claim of constitutional mandate is shaky.

The basic problem is, the union of a man and a woman is not similarly situated to the union of two men, which incidentally is not even similarly situated to the union of two women. These are three different things, which the law may perfectly well treat differently, without running afoul of the Fourteenth Amendment.

There has been a lot of grammatically logical but rationally ridiculous reference to the 1967 Supreme Court case, Loving v. Virginia, which rendered all state laws against inter-racial marriage null and void. Well, the facile assertion goes, if the state may not discriminate on the basis of race, the the state also may not discriminate on the basis of sex! Well, look at all the reasons a few paragraphs up that affirm that discrimination against people because they are (or may be, or are thought to be) gay... Unlike shopping at the grocery store, or preparing a blueprint, or owning a home, or renting a home, or driving a car, or a myriad of other features of daily life... sex IS of the essence of MARRIAGE. It is highly relevant, and to consider it is not in the least invidious.

The plaintiffs in Loving were married.  That was the crime they were prosecuted for. The State of Virginia knew darn well that a man of any color and a woman of any color could constitute a marriage. The state wanted to sort out which men could marry which women, for reasons that had nothing to do with what a marriage IS. As Justice Potter Stewart said in his concurrence, no law that makes an act a crime, or not, depending on the color of the actor, can withstand constitutional scrutiny. Two men, or two women, are not being discriminated against, they simply don't constitute a marriage, as the law currently defines it.

Now, just because there is no constitutional right to obtain a marriage license for your particular affection, whatever that might be, does not prevent any state from legislating that marriage licenses shall be issued to same sex couples. New York state has legislated exactly that. If a majority of the legislature can vote for that, and expect to be re-elected, then that means a majority of the citizens of the state are OK with it -- maybe not firmly committed, but not particularly opposed. So be it. Incidentally, an argument that it would be sound public policy to license same sex couples and call it a marriage does NOT set a precedent that it would be sound public policy to license polygamy or child brides, etc. That paranoia can be dispensed with, if the decision is a discretionary act of the legislature. But such fears are reasonably well founded if the courts find a "right to marry" whatever one sets one's affections upon.

From a religious, or cosmic, or teleological point of view, such laws may well create a legal fiction, but there are many legal fictions on the statute books, and for all legal, civic, earthly purposes, they are perfectly serviceable.

As we get beyond the urges that motivate some people to discriminate against gays, we also have to move beyond "Gay Pride." There is nothing in particular to be proud of. After all, it is simply the way some people are born, right? Nothing earned, nothing chosen, nothing pursued. Its just a condition. It is, actually, in an objective biological sense, a deviation from the norm. Yes, humanity is heteronormative. Deal with it.

Sexuality exists for one reason only: without powerful sexual hormones, nothing more complex than a sponge would go through the difficult gymnastics necessary to produce another generation of any species. Thus, sexuality itself is by nature and origin heterosexual. Homosexuality is a by-product, an outlier, a product of the imprecision of complex biochemistry. That there will be outliers to any biochemistry is almost inevitable.

For those born gay, a life with a fixed affection for individuals of their own sex is the only life they will ever have to live. There is no reason whatsoever for the overwhelming heterosexual majority to go out of our way to make life difficult for them. There are some who respond to religious teachings by choosing to live a celibate life. There are others who do not. Either one is civilly valid. What God will say about it is between each individual and God.

Personally, I rather doubt that God is all that bent out of shape. No doubt God knew that the imperfect process of biochemistry would generate some statistical outliers. A same-sex couple may lack some of the teleological significance that each and every heterosexual couple potentially has, but it may be quite fulfilling to the individuals engaged, nevertheless. Not everyone will agree, and there is no reason they should. Some firmly believe that yielding to homosexual impulses, however deeply embedded in one's being, is morally wrong. They have a right to say so, and everyone else has a right to pay attention, or to ignore them.

Here we come to one of the harder nuggets to digest. What about the photographer who refuses to take the pictures for a same-sex commitment ceremony? What about the baker who refuses to make the wedding cake for two men, or two women? Isn't that bigotry? Well, no, its not.

There is no sound case for "freedom of religion" as a defence against non-discrimination in such a commercial transaction. Nothing in the First Amendment exempts any person from complying with a neutral law of general application, just because "its against my religion to do that." In fact, if a customer buys a cake off the shelf, it is none of the baker's business what the customer plans to do with it. BUT, there is ample precedent that the machinery of the law may not be used to compel participation in an expressive message. The state, including the courts, and various civil rights or human rights commissions, may not compel speech.

Thus, if a customer asks a baker to ice the cake with "Adam and Steve, together forever in wedded bliss," the baker may lawfully and constitutionally refuse. This is no different from a Democratic silk screen artist refusing to make t-shirts for a Tea Party rally.  It is no different from a K street lobbyist telling a prospective client, "I can't take your job -- I abhor everything you want to lobby for."

And the photographer? That is an intimate involvement in memorializing, celebrating, recording in the best possible light, "the happiest day of our lives." You can't compel a person to do that if they find the whole thing abhorrent, no matter how rational or irrational their beliefs may be, or may be construed to be. And why in the world would anyone want such a person to be their wedding photographer anyway?

There is an excellent Supreme Court precedent on this subject, Hurley v. Irish-American Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Group of South Boston. Essentially, the court ruled that to force the organizers of a parade to include an expressive message they did not want to include, violates the First Amendment. The state may not use a non-discrimination in public accommodations law like that. Incidentally, I have always held that the IAGLVGSB should simply have reorganized as the Sir Roger Casement Memorial Marching Band, and joined the parade playing "Banna Strand." Who could have turned them down?

Then there is the matter of adoption. It is entirely plausible that, all other things being equal, the psychologically and socially most healthy and nurturing family unit for any child, male or female, is a stable, married heterosexual couple, precisely the pattern that can actually conceive a child. There could be quite a number of very subtle factors which would be very difficult to "prove" scientifically or, worse, by the blunt instrument of a judicial code of evidence.

However, other things are not always equal. There can be little doubt that many children would have a much healthier upbringing from a stable, devoted, perhaps even married, same-sex couple, as compared with a married, alcoholic, abusive, heterosexual married couple, one or both of whom might also be pedophiles. It is also true that many children would be far better off adopted by a stable nurturing gay couple than bouncing around the foster care system for two years or ten, waiting for the perfect married heterosexual couple to appear.

It would be best not to set terribly rigid standards favoring exclusively heterosexual couples, or insisting on equal option for same sex couples, and to let a hundred school compete in the field of adoption. State standards for adoption agencies can provide a useful floor, but should not enclose the possibilities in a straight-jacket.

The truth is, bandying about terms like "segregation" and "discrimination"  and "equality" as universal bads or goods is destructively imprecise. We segregate public bathrooms and shower rooms by sex, not because one sex is inferior and unworthy to be in the presence of the other, but because 99.9 percent of each sex prefers privacy and a sort of limited modesty in such situations. Many women would like this to be separate and UNequal in a sense, and that may be a valid claim.

As to the claims of the "transgender" population, I have little sympathy. Again, public restrooms are not segregated to affirm "gender identity." They are segregated to insure a modicum of privacy and modesty. In your heart, you may know you are a woman, but when the ladies see your dick, they sure feel like you are a man. No, you may not use the women's shower room. Come back and talk about it if you choose to have an operation, after the operation is complete. Individual unisex facilities, which can be used by those who feel uncomfortable in a more public group setting, are all the reasonable accommodation anyone has a right to expect from their fellow men and women. There should be no questions asked about WHY any given individual chooses to use them.

But there is no reason a legislature should not provide for or reasonably accommodate a measure that would comfort and reassure even a small fraction of the civilian population, and it seems likely that in the absence of any ill considered judicial mandate, the will of a majority of voters will make it happen in the reasonably near future. Will this be an enduring change or a passing fad? Only time will tell.

How a witch strengthened the faith of an Anglo-Catholic, and how a Wycliffe-Arminian Heterodox Protestant saw it

The first half of the title for this post concerns Hector, who posted How a witch strengthened my faith at the Aleksandreia site. The second half refers to my seldom-humble self, more or less a Christian who refrains from heresy by welcoming schism.

Those who are conversant in ancient Greek have observed that the term Paul used when he wrote of heresy has connotations of party or faction. Thus, I suspect that heresy is the act of seeking domination of the body of Christ for one's own party or faction. The orthodox are merely the heresy in power. The sin, if it can be called one, is the arrogance of believing that I, or my group, understand God better than any other individual or group within the faith, who has a slightly different idea of exactly what God is trying to tell us.

Hector lists a number of well-known miracles as the foundation or his faith. I have no objection. I frankly don't give much thought to whether these miracles did or did not occur. More often than not, my comment on such debates is "Don't mess with the stories." They are there for a reason. Perhaps they are there because some will recognize God through these accounts of miracles. Others may not, but may find the stories moving in some sense. Yet others may be put off by the improbability of such events - for them, no doubt, God has other ways of calling.

What ways? Well, as an avid reader of science, although not professionally competent, two of my favorites are the fact that the universe we live in began with a tremendous burst of electro-magnetic energy some thirteen billion years ago, and the fact that the foundations of evolutionary biology can be discerned in the first two chapters of Genesis. For the most part, human culture only discovered the first point in the mid-20th century, but somehow Moses knew all about it some 3500 years before the Hubble Space Telescope or the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe. The second escaped human knowledge until well after Darwin; before Darwin, we didn't have the empirical knowledge to recognize what the text was talking about, so our ancestors became infatuated with much simpler interpretations.

But these little pieces show a congruence between science - the empirical knowledge of our world - and monotheistic revealed faith, not enough to uphold any given prophet or savior, but enough to suggest that there is a God who created all that is, seen and unseen, a deity who occasionally has reason to communicate to us as best we can understand.

Whether I believe in specific miracles really truly happened is, to me, rather irrelevant. They may well have, without setting aside science. There is no question that our universe runs in accordance with patterns that science can and has explored with some accuracy. But, if there is anything transcendent, it would be roughly like a larger Venn diagram enclosing our universe as a subset, represented by a smaller Venn diagram. A transcendent God could intervene whenever he chose, and obviously chooses to do so rather seldom. Indeed, if there were no consistent scientific basis to the universe, miracles would not be particularly extraordinary. They would be commonplace random events in an unpredictable chaos.

So we come to the White Witch, a devout member of a schismatic Anglican church which insists on restricting the priesthood to males, relying strictly on the King James Version of the Bible, and presumably also on denying the validity of same-sex couples or marriages. She had an out of body experience, as a child, while clinically dead, before doctors noticed a restored heart beat and breathing. The experience was two minutes of conversation with Jesus Christ.

Do I find this credible? Not in the sense that it restores my faith, but I wouldn't presume to deny that it could not have happened. The fact that this happened to her as a child, that she had no religious training from her parents, provides a veneer of credibility. Onthe other hand, the fact that she later attended a Roman Catholic School, after that practiced some version of Wicca for twenty years, and only after that became an Anglican Christian, suggests that the conversation with Jesus had not made much of an immediate impression on her. For a skeptic, there is plenty of cause to doubt.

Again, I don't much care. The vision is for her, if for anyone. There is no way to test whether it is genuine. Therefore, I doubt that it is of great significance for me.

This former Wiccan "found her thirst for a particularly feminine spirituality slaked in a newfound devotion to the person of the Ever-Virgin Mary, Mother of God." Here is another conundrum for an Arminian raised in the attenuated Calvinism of the late 20th century Presbyterian Church USA. Do I believe that Mary, the physical human mother of "the carpenter's son," was taken body and soul into heaven? No, my faith does not rest on what many denominations, including the Roman, Greek, and Anglican churches, reverence as "the Assumption."

Frankly, I find the Jewish teaching quite credible, that it is no coincidence that the first Christian church dedicated to veneration of Mary as Virgin Mother of God was built in Ephesus. Those Ephesians darn well needed a female spirituality, and if they couldn't have Diana, they were going to have Mary. Besides, it gave the silversmiths a new theme for profitable images to sell. But, I don't write it all off as idol worship.

One of the unique features of Christianity is a God who so loved the world that he became human, lived our experience, has a specific desire to reach out to us. Much as I respect the Jewish foundation for monotheism, and the piety of Islam, these offer a more austere and remote version of God. Of course, if there is only one God, there are not Jewish and Christian and Muslim godlings out in space fighting proxy wars with each other through their earthly adherents. There is only one. But we ornery humans are incapable of having one comprehensive understanding or relationship.

So if some women, and some men, need a "feminine spirituality," I'm sure God is quite happy to let them find that in his mother - albeit Muhammed made sense when he denied that a transcendent God could have had either a mother or a son. I am informed that the formal name within those orthodoxies that declare anathema on thinking like mine is "modalism." Well, so be it. I don't suggest that God, per se, is modal in nature, but that God is transcendent, and happy to let us humans venerate any mode that brings us closer to a transcendent unitary God - or even to let us worship a triune image of God.

Having had little direct sense of divine presence - the kind received with fear and trembling - I have been known to say that I sense to presence of God when I see it reflected on the face of someone in a praise team, as sunlight is reflected on the face of the moon. I seldom sense any DIRECT response to my prayers - I always have the dry spell Hector has been experiencing of late. But I don't sense that I'm getting a busy signal. I think C.S. Lewis wrote that "men's prayers today are one of the innumerable cordinates with which the Enemy [as Screwtape references God] harmonizes the weather of tomorrow."

A Roman Catholic blogging as Roland de Chanson interjects into discussion the assertion that "God speaks the Truth to whom He chooses. And His Incarnate Son established a Church to teach that Truth." The first sentence is inarguable, except by denying that there is a God (singular). The second defines the boundary between adherents of the Roman Catholic church and all other Christian denominations. In my mind, the vast bureaucracy in the Vatican City, and its subordinate institutions throughout the world, are merely one more heresy, no better and no worse than those it persecuted when it had the carnal power to do so. The significance claimed for the words "thou are Cephas" is strictly an ex post facto intepretation of convenience, which might have been presented earlier except that the ink had not yet dried.

Roland also speculates, what if this Anglo-Catholic formerly Wiccan women who had a conjectural conversation with Jesus Christ is "an agent of the Evil One intent upon your soul’s perdition?" I for one don't worry much about such things, because I don't seek for signs and wonders to sustain my faith. The Evil One, if there is such a Manischean graft onto the teachings of the Tanach (aka Old Testament) may send me any number of people relating glorious visions, but I put little stock in such things.

I believe in part because, if I don't construct edifices of detailed explanations of the unexplainable, it makes sense. Further, I can look back on my life and see connections made with a significance I could never have forseen. If someone had not very subtlely (as Albert Einstein used to say) been watching out for me, by all the statistical criteria of a cold indifferent universe and a corporate capitalist regimented economy, I should certainly have been homeless long since.

(Note: Hector, please invite John E. and Franklin, and even Roland, to comment here after you've read it). And you might want to look at this discussion with Eulogos.