Perusing the many reactions of social conservatives to the nationwide legalization of gay marriage, I have some degree of sympathy for their fear that their sincerely held religious beliefs will be infringed somehow, either legally or just through brutal cultural suppression.
But what I find more troubling is their total silence about why people have decided that it’s wrong to deny gay couples the right to get married, adopt kids, be parents, and otherwise enjoy the same rights as other committed heterosexual couples. After all, there are still moral judgments about certain sexual behaviors, like destructive promiscuity and coercion, that are untouched by the Supreme Court’s decision. What people are doing is taking into consideration that people don’t control either same-sex or opposite-sex attraction. Kids these days simply don’t think there is a moral failing involved in being attracted to people of your own gender, nor do they think there is any virtue in abstinence outside of the intent to reproduce children. In other words, there’s a biological understanding of human sexuality that doesn’t give license to people to act any way they want sexually, but does allow them to have same-sex relationships if that is what they want. And it doesn’t wrongly insist that it’s healthier to suppress and deny your feelings and impulses than to express them freely and then act responsibly about them.
The social conservatives act like the motivation here is to marginalize their beliefs or to destroy religion, but it is really so much simpler than that. This is really about accepting people for who they are and not stigmatizing them for being different.
What social conservatives don’t get is that everything is not always about them. They are free to live their lives in accordance with their beliefs – as before – they simply no longer have he right to impose all of those beliefs on all others. Given that they value fidelity and often accuse gays of being more promiscuous than heterosexuals, they should indeed value any change which encourages greater fidelity amongst gays. But then, as I said, for them it is always about them. They don’t really care about anyone else, for all their professions of concern for the welfare and souls of others.
“What social conservatives don’t get is that everything is not always about them.”
You literally wrote exactly, word for word, what I was going to write. Spot on! 🙂
It is rather shocking how self righteous and self pitying these folks are. There’s exceedingly little capacity for empathy. Odd characteristics for those who consider themselves Christian.
They are blind to the irony. “Wah! You’re stigmatizing us just because we’re different!”
Fuck the Bigots’ Rights movement.
Having had minority interests all my life and minority opinions most of my life, I can only wonder at how so many people can feel so threatened when their interests and opinions cease to be considered mainstream. It is right-wing projection again? Do they fear the new majority will do what they always wanted to do to minorities?
Absolutely. When your way of dealing with minorities is to screw them, it is natural to fear that you will be screwed if you become a minority. That is what the race war in the US is about – white men (in particular) fearing that power is slipping from their hands and that soon others may oppose their values on them – as they have done so often in the past.
I very much agree with your basic premise with this post:
The social conservatives act like the motivation here is to marginalize their beliefs or to destroy religion, but it is really so much simpler than that. This is really about accepting people for who they are and not stigmatizing them for being different.
But as for this part:
I have some degree of sympathy for their fear that their sincerely held religious beliefs will be infringed somehow, either legally or just through brutal cultural suppression.
Why?
Look, their “fear”, if we call it that, is no different than past religious-based “fears” that have caused large amounts of needless suffering. Think of the fear that accepting and tolerating pregnant unmarried girls/women would lead to the breakdown of society. Or, going back in time, that accepting anyone not attending church on Sunday – or doing any one of a thousand different activities on Sunday – would lead to breakdown of society. Not to mention all the racism that got tied into these supposedly religious-based fears that led to restrictions embodied in law.
The fact is all of these have one thing in common. Instead of normal human empathy the conservatives exhibit anger and hatred against things they fear. In most cases the fear of the different is the main fear, but in many cases other fears are present. For gay rights, a large number of conservative men fear their own “urges” or secret actions. For racial beliefs, a lot of white men fear that their white women secretly prefer black men. None of this is good.
So on that point i disagree with you – I have no sympathy for their fears.
Agreed, I have no sympathy for their fears either.
I grew up needing to be constantly concerned about the emotions of people likely to make my life hell if I so much as mentioned my same-sex attractions. My fears were real, based on their actual behavior.
I have zero fucks to give about fears they have that are based on bigotry and the opportunistic lies of their leaders.
What social conservatives fear most is having the ability taken away of discriminating against people for who they are. That is because social stigma and discrimination is how they have enforced their “values” and beliefs, including beliefs about social status and private behavior. Taking away that power of censure strikes hard at their attempts to have all other people be just like them. For those who are Christian and think this is grounded in Christian doctrine, it is a horrible twisting of the Great Commission as is much that passes for evangelism in contemporary America.
Those Christian denominations who have opened marriage to same sex couples (Episcopal, UCC, and some others, and the Reconciling Congregations movement within the United Methodist Church) understand that excommunicating people (stigmatizing and discriminating against them) does not get them closer to the to understanding the Gospel.
nor gets them closer to filling emptying pews …
The likely real not-so-slippery slope:
7 LGBT Issues That Matter More Than Marriage
Get ready for the social conservative arguments and claims.
I think we’ve already heard all the arguments already, trotted out against whatever hate crime and bullying legislation has been proposed. But they’re on the defensive, against some passed federal legislation (thanks, Obama).
There was a time when I thought the left shouldn’t even take an interest in marriage equality because it benefits mainly those who are already in a privileged position, concerned with things like big weddings, adoption or surrogacy fees, estate planning, etc., while the issues affecting defenseless and poor gay people, like anti-gay violence, are ignored. Now I feel the marriage issue has been a huge watershed that will bring these things along with it, as we’ve begun to see with the changes in the Boy Scouts, the public welcome of Caitlyn Jenner, and so on. We hoped and we changed!
We’ll see.
Yasmin Nair gives it to us straight.
Nice topic ..
Teluk Benoa
Teluk Benoa
Christian cultural privilege is similar in its socially corrosive effects as white privilege. In each case, the privileged one feels licensed to think poorly of the minority. They quickly follow this by feeling aggrieved when they’re asked to consider the challenges and experiences of the minority. The “weird/inferior” people are almost always asked to accommodate the predominant culture.
The default is that the privileged one is always right unless proven otherwise.
Christian cultural privilege is the last refuge of white privilege as any experience with much of the black church show.
Ethnic uniformity was the whole logic of the nation state. For conservatives, what they are conserving is an Anglo-European supremacist Christian state. After all, what else is settler imperialism for?
social conservative fear of marriage equality is like rw hatred of Obamacare. It does pose a threat to them, it’s just they can’t be explicit about what the threat is. Just as Obamacare is a threat because it is gov providing an important, live saving element to citizens, marriage equality is a threat precisely because it is marriage equality in the other sense, i.e. marriage based in equal love not goal of reproduction nor subordination of female to male. That is a real problem for social conservatives (see, Duggars, for example)
Its not going to bother me in the least if the imaginary sky-friend of the social conservatives takes a hit.
Good riddance.
Yep. The Santa Claus sitting in a white robe on a cloud role never really matched up with the Biblical Jehovah very well. Seems like that one was always coming miraculously to the defense of the colonized, the poor, the foreigners (tell the CIA that God hates it when you anally rape foreigners–destroying cities kind of vengeance), the outsiders. Or less miraculously physically and more miraculous socially as the homeless guy with a bunch of buddies who spouted crazy stuff going from town to town and finally popped off at the guys making money off of faith, devotion, and religion. That was so threatening they killed him.
But you can’t kill an idea. On the other hand, you can so overthink an idea that it turns to mush. That’s pretty much what’s happened to most of the world’s “axial religions”. And yet these are the origins of the notions of justice, mercy, consciousness, illusion, form, balance, dignity, nothingness, contradiction — ideas that have been absorbed into what has become (primarily secular) philosophy.
And the effort at stripping away the mythological trappings of the 19th century has become a deeper understanding of how mythology functions for a society when it has not turned to mush–how the poetry, music, calendars, visual symbols provide a common culture worth living in for a society.
By and large, science is far more conservative than the social conservative. One example in the Darwin versus fundamentalists debate, the traditions at stake are the research from Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle that resulted in The Origin of Species (1859) and especially The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871) over against The Fundamentals (1910-1915). Since then science has moved conservatively onward in fits and starts, but the Fundamentalist preachers have pursued one innovation after another, partly a matter of incorporating capitalist marketing ideas into their ministries, partly rejiggering the Fundamentalist theology, partly doubling down on dogmatic assertions. The result is grotesqueries like the Noah’s Ark theme park. Science has its own grotesqueries, like science museum gift shops in which everything is made in China and is mostly symbols of science (functioning like saints cards) and not tools to have ordinary people actually learn to do science.
When that imaginary sky-friend leaves, Chthulu replaces him or the culture of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. And the cultic music, art, drama surrounding them start becoming treated more seriously as it gets more frequently referenced. Human imagination and narrative building just does that as a social recreation. And those get elaborated out with syncretic combinations of Chthulu and the FSM combined in the same narrative. And then the philosopher horn in and start asking what it all means. And then the performances are regularized (Bloomsday anyone) and the conservative start insisting that folks adhere to the original mythology and the documentary research begins. And then the literature becomes the basis for ethical pronouncements and definitions of in-groups and out-groups.
It’s not just the Christians, it a common human proclivity. Folks are just exploring different imaginary universes. And imagination is real, and its constructions are real. Practical is a different matter; although sometimes they turn out to be.
If there is anything that Conservatives are talented at, it’s their ability to project: time and time again, the very things they fear the most are the very things they would impress upon others.
What Social Conservatives don’t get is that no one is forcing them to do anything, even as they believe they are being forced to do something, “through brutal cultural suppression.”
They have nothing but the victim card to play, and even that is the Joker.
What I don’t get is when did governments begin sanctioning marriages at all? Historically that was a matter between families but I’ve not seen where/when that transitioned to a governmental function.
In the American colonies the government was involved through marriage bonds. These were financial bonds that the groom put up to ensure that he showed up for the wedding. As bastards (the term then) were wards of the Anglican church (an arm of the state) the forfeited bonds were a form of insurance for their support.
As the states became interested in demographic statistics, they invented the birth certificate (taking over from the parish register), the marriage license (removing the bond), and the death certificate (taking over from the parish register).
Once those registries were in place, it was all to convenient to tie various state privileges to them to encourage people to marry. (Someone no doubt has done a history of what drove this; it could have been the Progressive Era churches.)
It is a fascinating question. If it’s not been done yet, I’m sure that some culture theory grad student will be on it soon.
I see Texas AG is acting a fool again.
“Marriage” in the eyes of the law/govt/state is a legally binding contract between 2 individuals…RELIGION should have nothing to do with it. You don’t believe in gay marriage on religious grounds well that is ur right in America. BUT if you are an employee of the state and therfore the govt…u follow the guideline of ur employer…the state. and you issue marriage licenses…PERIOD!!! No one is forcing churches to hold gay wedding ceremonies. Besides any gay person who is a member of a church and paying tithes at that church who wants to marry in a church that wont respect them is a fool!!!
Last I heard is all of the county clerks said they would be issuing licenses regardless of the gender pairings of the couples. I would like to know if that is still true of Texas.
This is really about accepting people for who they are and not stigmatizing them for being different.
Pshaw.
It’s about the total repudiation of the Christian moral view of anything to do with sex, and the spreading fear among Christians that their view will be at least in part criminalized and they will be persecuted to for teaching it or simply adhering to it.
They are probably right, to a degree.
It is about the use of the state to enforce the religious views of one set of people on people who do not necessarily adhere to that religion.
What will be penalized through anti-discrimination lawsuits (a far way from criminalization) is discrimination outside of religious organizational contexts. Religious bodies will still be allowed to discriminate for religious and probably also for charitable fields.
Christians with secular businesses will be open to suit.
A large number of Christians will be members of denominations that permit same sex marriage. A large number will not.
The Christian moral view of anything to do with sex is neither uniform, consistent, nor independent of the historical situation at the time the authority was writing.
Most people after a while will use commons sense to figure out where the changes need to be.