There is currently a debate raging in California over gay marriage. Californian voters passed Proposition 8, banning gay marriage and Chief U.S District Judge Vaughn Walker (a Reagan appointee and a gay man) just ruled it unconstitutional. The matter of gay marriage is in a state of jurisprudential flux all over the USA. Some states ban it, a growing number allow it (five as at writing, along with civil unions in New Jersey) and some ignore it, while attempts to overthrow bans on constitutional grounds have met with mixed success. It gets even more complex when a state that does not recognize gay marriage, say Texas, is asked to grant a divorce or otherwise act upon a gay marriage performed in a state like Vermont that allows them.
The matter of whether banning gay marriage is prohibited by the US Constitution will ultimately be decided by the Supreme Court. If history is anything to go by, the court will wait a few years, allow the lower courts to rack up a series of inconsistent opinions, then swoop in, avenger-like and decide the matter for the foreseeable future. My guess is that the Court will ultimately rule that prohibitions on gay marriage are unconstitutional as being inconsistent with the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution – the one that was famously dispositive for blacks in Brown v. The Board of Education.
In a nutshell, the Equal Protection Clause has been interpreted to mean that the government can only deny benefits (marriage in this case) to a specifically delineated class of people (gays in this case) if it can demonstrate a compelling governmental reason to do so. Denying a marriage license on the basis of sexual proclivity, something increasingly seen as socially benign, will, I suspect, attract a high degree of scrutiny from the Court. I cannot conceive of a legitimate state interest being persuasively asserted to maintain the ban.
Those most fervently supporting the unconstitutionality of gay marriage bans are, not surprisingly, gay rights activists and those most ardently opposing it are, once again, not surprisingly, religious groups. Indeed, it was significant funding from the Church of Latter Day Saints that helped secure the passing of Proposition 8 in the first place. Here however, the religious groups face a dilemma. When doors close and lovers whisper, their principal objection to gay marriage is biblical - they basically believe that their Sky-Fairy does not like homosexual behavior. They cannot admit this in court briefs, however, as doing so would almost certainly doom their case to failure under church-state separation. As such, they are left floundering, looking for non-religious grounds to stop gays from marrying.
This rolling battle over gay marriage highlights one of my fundamental objections to religion. I would have no objection if religious groups opposed gays within their churches. They are free to condemn gay marriages in their literature, inveigh against them from their pulpits and expel any member who undergoes a gay wedding ceremony. It is when they go a step further and want to export their beliefs beyond the four walls of their churches and impose them on involuntary participants (including Buddhist, Hindu, and atheist) that I raise up in objection.
By this, I do not even mean proselytizing. They are free to do that. I mean imposing their superstition based social norms on others, as opposed to simply trying to convince people to voluntarily sign up to them. In the instant case, they do not like gay marriage. Fine, they are free not to attend one and are free to have no gay friends. They are within their rights to get on their altars, or on soap boxes in public parks and harangue homos, lambast lesbians and trash trannies in an effort to turn the public against them, or in a (doomed) effort to change their sexual persuasion. But what they are not free to do is to impose their Bronze Age dogma on others by telling gays, through legislative fiat, that they cannot (as opposed to should not) engage in sexual activity or marry a member of the same sex.
They are trying to do so all over the country. Never mind that two gays marrying does not impact their marriage or lives. They don’t like it, so it should be banned for all. I personally hate most nauseating, mainstream Broadway musicals, but would not dream of banning Rent or Jersey Boys - tempting and all as that might be.
Another, admittedly more trivial example of religious groups imposing their will on others, is the so called Blue Laws. Wikipedia explains them best:
“Southern and mid-western states also passed numerous laws to protect the (Sunday) Sabbath during the mid to late nineteenth century. Laws targeted numerous groups including saloon owners, Jews, Seventh-day Adventists, and non-religious peoples. These Sunday laws enacted at the state and local levels would sometimes carry penalties for doing non-religious activities on Sunday as part of an effort to enforce religious observance and church attendance. Numerous people were arrested for playing cards, baseball, and even fixing wagon wheels on Sunday. Some of these laws still exist today…… Many states still prohibit selling alcohol on Sunday, or at least before noon on Sunday, under the rationale that people should be in church on Sunday morning, or at least not drinking. At least one unusual feature of American culture—the ability to buy groceries, office supplies, and housewares from a drug store—can be traced to blue laws (under blue laws, drug stores are generally allowed to remain open on Sunday to accommodate emergency medical needs).”
In short, I still cannot buy a nice Chilean red on a Sunday in my home in North Carolina due to Sothern preachers wanting to ensure that their superstitious flock are not distracted from their weekly dose of god by a weekly dose of scotch. The fact that thousands of atheists, Buddhists, Jews and Hindus etc. get caught in the same theological drift net is, well, tough. By the way, for those of a legal bent, if you ever want to read an example of the US Supreme Court subordinating First Amendment constitutional analysis to entrenched political and religious interests, I recommend the 1961 decision of McGowan v. Maryland, the seminal case in which Blue laws were upheld. Orwellian doublespeak at its best.
By way of a far darker example, for years in less educated parts of the USA, anesthetic was denied to women in childbirth, because Christians believed the pain had to be suffered to atone for Eve’s original sin. Many women suffered needlessly. Any creationist woman who believes this nonsense is free to refuse anesthetic and suffer the consequences, but they have no right to deny the drugs to those who want them. But their inability to mind their own business meant that all suffered equally.
The human papillomavirus (HPV) is a sexually transmitted virus. that is, in most cases, relatively harmless. However, it is very common. More than 80% of American women will have contracted at least one strain of HPV by age fifty. In a small number of cases, it causes complications like cancer and gential warts. Worldwide, HPV is the most common sexually transmitted infection in adults.
Upon development of a vaccine against the disease, public health officials in Australia, Canada and Europe quickly recommend vaccination of young women against HPV to prevent cervical cancer and genital warts. Public awareness campaigns followed and the number of cases of HPV infection are expected to fall precipitously in the next few decades.
The USA also ended up in the same position, with one notable exception. The religious right opposed and slowed the widespread release of the vaccine on moral grounds. They felt that the freedom from disease it allowed would cause teenage girls to be more “promiscuous”. Once again, they were not content to allow those who did not share their views access to the vaccine – it had to be withheld from all.
In the same vein, many Catholics oppose condoms and other forms of birth control, so they want to ban their sale to everybody; many Christians believe that a collection of a few human cells has an invisible essence called a “soul”, so they try to universally ban stem cell research (those with Lou Gehrig's Disease, Parkinson's Disease or MS be damned); and there are countless other examples of where religious people impose their views on other non believers – banned movies, banned books, gambling restrictions, “offensive” paintings and other art being censored, dress codes being enforced, assisted suicide being outlawed, funding for AIDS and needle exchange programs being opposed on the grounds of the supposed “immoral” behavior of its victims, female teachers who have sex with their 15 year-old male students being imprisoned for years.
On the issue of abortion, things are admittedly more complicated. While the Christian Taliban definitely seeks to control a women’s right to chose, at least here they have an argument that a third party – the aborted child, is being impacted. They have no such argument in any of the above cases. They are all naked attempts to curtail the freedoms of third parties based on their own religious superstitions. Have you ever heard of any religion anywhere in the World ever being accused of being too open minded and liberal about what non-believers do?It is this fundamental and pervasive drive to impose upon and control others that makes me oppose the superstitions that underwrite dedicated religious convictions. While the US is hardly poised to suddenly go the way of Iran, the above examples should serve as a canary in a coal mine for free thinkers about what can happen if the unaccountability of religious dogma is ever coupled with unbridled political power.
I only wish that, in addition to banning the coveting of one’s neighbor’s goods and wife, the Bronze Age stone tablets they are so fond of had an eleventh comandment; "Thou Shalt Mind Thine Own Goddamn Business".
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