Gay And/Or Sacred

My ambivalence toward Proposition 8 during the last election here in California was and continues to be profound. I'm married to a member of the opposite sex, belief marriage is the union between man and woman, and my haphazard faith holds that that union is actually sacred. Meanwhile I have plenty of gay friends and relatives and I want them all to be happy and fulfilled. Plus, it seems that the more committed unions between any two people there are out there, the better and more stable society will be.

I'm also despondent about how dispensable and unserious so many heterosexual attitudes towards marriage have proven to be. Considering how badly us breeders treat marriage, I'm shocked there are still gays out there interested in it.

And I thought the California Supreme Court was being arrogant and anti-democratic when it overturned the electorate's specific desire to keep marriage solely between a man and woman. Even though the Court's decision itself was well argued and convincing.

But amid all the post-election hoopla about Prop 8, no one seems willing to touch the element that I'm sure propels so many opponents of gay marriage: sacredness. In virtually every religion marriage isn't just a convenient arrangement for generating and raising kids, but a sacred rite and sacred institution ordained by God. People who take their faith seriously -- and there are a lot of them -- are understandably upset over anything that seems to intrude on the sacred aspects of their lives. Step on the sacred and people who take the sacred seriously will be thoroughly rebellious.

There are surely as many attitudes towards marriage amongst gays as there is among heterosexuals. And there are likely plenty of gay couples who take their vows with all the sacred seriousness of any Mormon, Catholic, Baptist, or Jewish heterosexual couple. But generally speaking, the campaign for gay marriage has seemed more interested in just checking off one more box on the campaign to normalize homosexuality within society. There seems to be little appreciation for the sacredness of marriage among something near a plurality of their fellow citizens. If gays want to gain same-sex marriage rights democratically (and that's the way it ought to be done) then a good first step toward convincing the electorate would be acknowledging marriage as sacred.

Of course there's an entire other argument to be made here about why the state is in the sacred institution business at all. And the ultimate resolution of all this may lie in separating the civil contract of marriage from the religious and sacred.