I get into a fair number of … heated discussions … with religious people. Like caffeine addiction, this is probably something I should be concerned about and address, but which I prefer to nurse. Today something popped up in the ol’ Google Reader that brought me back to three specific old fights.
The spark is this Politico piece about how, “The National Organization for Marriage, a prominent backer of the successful campaign against same-sex marriage in California, is launching a $1.5 million ad campaign this morning aimed at forestalling same-sex marriage support in other key states.”
Before I get started, let’s go to the tape:
Now dig this:
“The biggest argument — and the biggest lie — put forward by those who want to redefine marriage is that it’s not going to have any affect on you. ‘Why should you care? It’s not going to have any effect on your marriage,” said NOM executive director Brian Brown. “In state after state we’ve seen same-sex marriage directly conflict with people’s religious beliefs.”
What a fun bait and switch. He sets you up by claiming that he’s going to show that it’s a lie that, “It’s not going to have any effect on your marriage,” but then actually argues that it, “conflict[s] with people’s religious beliefs.”
So this is for the friend whose retort, when I said that religion is the problem at the root of this issue, was “Some of the most famous homophobes were godless and closeted: Roy Cohn, J Edgar Hoover.” Seriously, that’s great and all, but J Edgar Hoover didn’t put up $1.5m to manipulate public opinion.
Last November I had a long argument with a colleague who listed as one reason to support Proposition 8 the fact that she didn’t want her preacher sued for refusing to marry some gay dudes. At the time, I thought that made sense, and I was happy to tell her that exceptions exist for that kind of thing. I thought this made so much sense that I later defended the right of the Catholic church to excommunicate bishops who ordained women, saying:
[I]t may be somewhat important to protect these stupid rules. For instance, one of the things the pro-Prop-8 crowd says is, “What if some gay couple sues my priest to make him marry them, which is against his religion?” It’s important for them, and it’s important for us to be able to say, “Look, your [...] religion is safe, there’s an explicit judicial precedent which says those types of lawsuits are not valid.”
But then I read something like:
Brown cited the decision of Catholic Charities in Massachusetts to stop handling adoptions in response to a law banning discriminating against gays and lesbians hoping to adopt children.[...]
Proponents of same-sex marriage argue that the legal changes will, if anything, strengthen marriage. There have also been moves to protect groups like Catholic Charities from conflicts, and the Vermont same-sex marriage bill that became law yesterday, for instance, contains religious exemptions.
And the kowtowing drives me crazy. There is absolutely no reason to allow anyone to discriminate against gays and lesbians hoping to adopt, so that sort of “exemption” should be out of the question. But it’s clearly something they would want. So now I don’t know how I feel about this.
Anyway, I’ll give the last word to Tony, because he’s smarter than I am:
So, the evidence of the real impact it will have on your lives is, religious bigots will stop doing charitable work if they can’t discriminate? I really fail to see how this is something for which gay marriage is responsible. It’s a but-for cause, to be sure, but we don’t get to blame everything on but-for causes: If a guy kills someone who mouths off at him in a bar, he doesn’t get to say “What? I wouldn’t have done it but for his crack about my mom.”