Faith and reason...and a little bit of semantics

I was reading blogs yesterday when a link on Best Gay Blogs caught my eye. It read “ten arguments against gay marriage”. Intrigued, I followed the link to a post which outlined ten reasons why gay marriage is something to be feared and rejected. It occurred to me that anti gay marriage groups are fuelled not only by vicious right-wing rhetoric, malicious homophobia, and a penchant for complex and confusing sentences, but also by a serious case of irrational logic.

The post was a summary of an article on another site, No Gay Marriage (if you want a link, go to the post on Teresa Centric’s site; NGM aren’t getting a link from me). Teresa posted the summary to shoot them down, some were actually a little funny and most if not all were totally unrealistic anyway. It would have been amusing if it weren’t so appalling. I can’t say I was surprised—I’m way too jaded for that—but I was appalled nonetheless. Reading the article got me thinking about how faith and reason seem to be mutually exclusive on this issue and how semantics play a big part in its interpretation.

At this point, I should point out that I am Catholic. Increasingly, the term “gay Catholic”—and “gay Christian” or any “gay any-other-religion” for that matter—is becoming oxymoronic, from both sides of the fence; each thinks that you can’t be one if you are the other. But I disagree, strongly.

Obviously my conception of what it means to be a Catholic differs sharply from that of the anti-marriage lobby. Christian fundamentalism is constitutionally rule-governed; tradition and biblical “evidence” (I use the term lightly) always win out in their arguments. For me, religion is more spiritual: a connection between your deepest self and your Creator in which rules have little place or authority. Even on the question of morality, rules are fairly moot to my mind; if I followed the rules simply for the sake of avoiding punishment rather than for doing the right thing, am I really a good person? Or just a coward who doesn’t have the intestinal fortitude to do the right thing for its own sake?

God is love. The bible says this in plain black and white. So how could God possibly hate people who are, among a long list of other things, gay? If hate is the absence of love, then surely it must be impossible for God to hate. I’m not for a second saying that God is not angered at times, nor do I suggest that he blithely condones everything like some bearded grandfather figure sitting on a cloud while his angels play the hard, but I certainly don’t see how love between two people who happen to be of the same gender can be wrong. Love is amoral. It is neither good nor bad, morally speaking. It just is.

They argue that gay marriage will result in the end of the family—the building block of society—and as such must be stopped at any cost. But what is a family? Personally, I feel that family is a state of mind. I consider my close friends to be part of my family; I feel that a family composed of two dads or two mums with children to be of equal value to one with a mum, dad and children. Why should a family that does not conform to their notion of family be any less family-like? If each group is a family, then gay marriage will in fact help entrench the family unit into society more concretely because in each model the parents of the children will be bound together in matrimony. Even if one does not accept my assertion that same-sex couples with children constitute the hallowed family, why should their marriage affect any other family unit? Unless, of course, they want it to. Don’t like gay marriage? Don’t marry someone of your own sex and shut up.

You would think that any reasonable person could see these arguments for what they are, but in my experience reason has little to do with the arguments of the anti-marriage lobby. They are veiled in the rhetoric of biblical prohibition and moral superiority and few within the fundamentalist camp are willing to question such dire predictions when they are framed in the rhetoric of “traditional marriage”. They ignore, of course, the fact that until recently, historically speaking, the emphasis of the marriage contract has shifted from one of ownership (one in which the wife became property of the husband) to one of mutuality and commitment.

It seems to me that it often boils down to a different interpretation of “family” and of the nature of God. There isn’t much I can do about it—despite what I think, say or believe, the anti-gay-marriage lobby will continue spreading its message of hate. I just don’t see how they can justify such hatred and exclusion by invoking a God of love and inclusion.