“ON GAY “MARRIAGE”
The issue of gay marriage is not a civil rights issue. The civil rights movement arose because of racial discrimination that blatantly foreclosed or limited black opportunities to obtain the basics of human sustenance, including education, housing, financing, employment, and fair pay for equal work. There is no comparison between the gay minority and the black minority communities in these and other aspects of “civil rights.” As the work of Richard Florida on the “creative economy” has made clear, the gay community is advantaged, not disadvantaged. That is one reason why gays are seen as an asset to cities. They help, for example, to gentrify black and other lower income neighborhoods. They typically have higher incomes and greater wealth than most Americans.
So, if gay marriage is not a “civil rights” issue, what sort of issue is it? It is a matter of public vs. private. The gay marriage movement is a noisy minority insisting that public law should assign public value to private behavior. Unlike the (at first) “noisy minority” pressing for civil rights, it is not a movement to change public law to honor our most cherished public values, constitutional or otherwise. Gay sex has nothing to do with the public purposes of either sex or marriage. Heterosexual sex is the greatest gift of evolution. It arose over millennia for a fundamental reason: so that species could survive and further evolve through the generation of difference and variety. So, gay marriage is contrary to evolution and the progress of human life. The issue is just that fundamental.
So, fellow citizens who are homosexual: We recognize your right to live your private lives in ways that you choose. Most of us don’t give a damn about what you do in your bedrooms. We support your efforts to remove any vestiges of sexual discrimination in employment, insurance, contracts and other aspects of civil law. BUT we will not agree to relabel the public institution of marriage to suit your private preferences – that gay marriage be recognized as having public value equivalent to that of heterosexual marriage. At issue, fundamentally, is the nature of the human family – how children are procreated and raised to be fully human – of how the human species advances in a world of differences. Homosexual couples cannot conceive a child. It takes a man and a woman to make a baby and, even more important, to properly raise a child to assume a fully mature role in human society. Values inconsistent with the creation, maintenance and advance of human life are not maintainable as public values.
Listening to twenty or so people give political speeches in succession may well be worse than being water-boarded. Listening to twenty or so political speeches in an air-conditioned room with close to 300 people who (more or less) are on board with just about everything that is likely to be said at that kind of event is choir practice. But having that kind of access to that many candidates for three hours is priceless.