Here’s a good case I’ve heard made for gay marriage, by Christopher Hitchens:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSmP-J_J7OE

He’s a smart guy. And speaking of Guy, his memoir is well worth the read.

That’s good news!

I realized I was a lesbian when I was 13 and came out at 18 when I was a freshman in college, so I didn’t miss crucial stages of social development that quite a lot of lesbians and gays over 30 have. I still marvel at the memory of the women I saw in the mid 1970′s coming out in their forties, or older, after decades of posing as straight in heterosexual marriages. At last they could be themselves and act from authentic feelings, but emotionally they were in their teens and I was astonished to see how they had to undergo the maturation process they had never been allowed to experience at the age-appropriate time. The straight old fogies my age who do not realize how crucial this aspect of socialization is to developing as a moral person with the capacity to marry and stay married need to be told about it because they are completely unaware that they are committing a moral atrocity by denying lesbians and gays these opportunities that first-class citizens take for granted.

Cynthia

I agree with you on the whole “socializing process”, but I think things are getting better. Young people these days are looking at this and thinking “how exactly is *this* wrong?” I went to a staunchly Christian school where there were boys wearing makeup, open LGBT dating and no one really cared. (This amongst the students; it never occurred to anyone to ask the staff.)

Thank you for calling my attention to Lee Harris’s essay, “The Future of Tradition.” I happen to be one of the “shining examples” he talks about and I find his reasoning is specious sophistry. Here is the most telling sentence (boldfacing mine): “But there can be no advantage to them if they insist on trying to co-opt the shining example of an ethical tradition that they themselves have abandoned in order to find their own way in the world.” Lesbians and gays did NOT abandon any ethical tradition: we were kicked out — and for corrupt reasons — religious leaders strive to control every detail of the reproductive lives of their followers in order to coerce them into producing wealth and power for their religion in the form of babies. This also drives religious leaders to come up with reasons to deny equality and control over their bodies and reproductive lives to women. It is the fact that we are kicked out of the socializing process, usually at an early age, that is at the root of many of the problems lesbians and gays have in the areas of emotional, psychological, moral and ethical development — that is, the incidence of problems beyond the baseline of those experienced by straight people. Giving lesbians and gays full equality under the law is going to make society more moral, upright and ethical by bringing us back into the socializing processes provided for straight people.

As for polygamy, there’s no such thing as a sequence in these matters. Polygamy IS a traditional form of marriage, polygamy is in the Bible, Islam supports/mandates polygamy, start-up Christian sects embrace polygamy and the Mormon church has a prophet who is likely to have a revelation any minute to ordain that “plural marriage” — which is one of the three definitions of marriage Mormons have — is the new hotness the instant he thinks it’s safe to do so. Mormons practiced polygamy until 1904 and only renounced it because Congress saw they were operating as a political organization determined to establish themselves as the government and forced them to drop the practice. Frankly, I think there are a LOT of religious groups that have a burning desire for polygamy — if they didn’t, they would be fighting THAT, because it is polygamy that is the clear and present danger to marriage.

By the way, it is the logic of the Left that creates the illusion of a sequence of groups that much be admitted to equality. It started with the arguments of the civil rights movement for blacks and states that exclusion and being forced into second-class citizenship is based on hatred, which is mean and wrong, so we must destroy hatred and never draw any boundaries in society on account of how hateful this is. I can’t imagine a more destructive and anti-Constitutional rationale for social change, which is one of the reasons that I NEVER use the language and concepts of the Left to argue for equality for lesbians and gays. Here’s the thing: you can’t destroy hatred and it is anti-liberty to try because people are entitled to liberty and freedom regarding their emotions. However, as we see from the NAACP and Obama, corrupt people can and will manipulate you forever concerning whether or not you are sufficiently hate-free according to their ever-changing and ever-receding standards. Hatred is the emotion that sociopaths gin up in their followers to get their obedience and hide their real objective, which always is to grab power. So the wise thing to do is to ignore hatefulness and look for the sociopaths and figure out their true motives. When you do that, you can get somewhere because you finally are engaged in the real issues.

Cynthia

Sorry about that. On a more serious note, I am one of those who simply has trouble believing anyone has the time to fight _against_ gay marriage. Don’t these people have better things to do? How about, oh I don’t know, organizing some solidarity with the persecuted infidels of the African continent?

There are only two arguments I’ve ever seen against gay marriage that aren’t obviously ludicrous. I’m not sure quite how to evaluate them, so I pass them on for your consideraton. The one is that the next step after gay marriage will be a push for polygamy and the people pushing for polygamy have no interest whatsoever in gay rights or many other rights, for that matter. The other is – well, it’s made at length by Lee Harris, who is gay and living in a decade long partnership, in “The Future of Tradition”. I respect Harris a great deal, so he’s worth reading, just to evaluate the argument.