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发帖数: 4346 | 1 The real reasons people oppose gay marriage
So far, we've examined the reasons everyone give for opposing gay marriage.
Let's examine now the real reasons people oppose it, even fear it:
1. Just not comfortable with the idea. The fact the people aren't
comfortable with the idea stems primarily from the fact that for many years,
society has promoted the idea that a marriage between members of the same
sex is ludicrous, mainly because of the objections raised above. But if
those objections don't make sense, neither does the idea that gay marriage
is neccessarily ludicrous. Societies have long recognized that allowing
civil rights to certain groups may offend some, and at times, even the
majority. But that is why constitutional government was established -- to
ensure that powerless, unpopular minorities are still protected from the
tyranny of the majority.
2. It offends everything religion stands for. Whose religion? Many
mainstream Christian denominations, to be sure, and definitely most branches
of Islam and Orthodox Judaism, but outside those, most religions are
unopposed to gay marriage, and many actually favor it. When the Mormon
church arrogantly claimed to represent all religions in the Baehr vs. Lewin
trial in Hawaii, the principal Buddhist sect in that state made it very
clear that the Mormon church didn't represent them, and made it very clear
that they support the right of gay couples to marry. That particular
Buddhist sect claims many more members in Hawaii than does the Mormon church
. In a society that claims to offer religious freedom, the use of the power
of the state to enforce private religious sensibilities is an affront to all
who would claim the right to worship according to the dictates of their own
conscience.
3. Marriage is a sacred institution and gay marriage violates that sanctity.
This is, of course, related to the motive above. But it is really subtly
different. It's based on the assumption that the state has the
responsibility to "sanctify" marriages - a fundamentally religious idea.
Here we're dealing with people trying to enforce their religious doctrines
on someone else, but by doing it through weakening the separation of church
and state, by undermining the Bill of Rights. Not that there's anything new
about this, of course. But the attempt itself runs against the grain of
everything the First Amendment stands for - one does not truly have freedom
of religion if one does not have the right to freedom from religion as well.
It would seem to me that anyone who feels that the sanctity of their
marriage is threatened by a gay couple down the street having the right to
marry, is mighty insecure about their religion anyway.
Even if one accepts the presumption of the United States as a bible-
believing, Christian nation as an acceptable legal doctrine, as many
conservative Christians insist, and the bible should be the basis for the
sacred institution of marriage, perhaps those Christians should get out
their bibles and actually read them for a change. Including all the
inconvenient passages that not only permit but can even require polygamy,
involuntary marriage and the like.
How about Deuteronomy 25:5-10, for example: "When brothers reside together,
and one of them dies and has no son, the wife of the deceased shall not be
married outside the family to a stranger. Her husband's brother shall go in
to her, taking her in marriage and performing the duty of a husband's
brother to her, and the firstborn whom she bears shall succeed to the name
of the deceased brother, so that his name may not be blotted out of Israel.
But if the man has no desire to marry his brother's widow, then his brother'
s widow shall go up to the elders at the gate and say 'My husband's brother
refuses to perpetuate his brother's name in Israel; he will not perform the
duty of a husband's brother to me. Then the elders of his town shall summon
him and speak to him. If he persists, saying 'I have no desire to marry her,
' then his brother’s wife shall go up to him in the presence of the elders,
pull his sandal from his foot, spit in his face, and declare 'This is what
is done to the man who does not build up his brother’s house. Throughout
Israel his family will be known as 'the house of him whose sandal was pulled
off.'"
If the Bible is sacred and inviolate when it comes to the institution of
marriage, then the above passage and all the other inconvenient ones require
reverence too, do they not? If the Christian is going to say, well, that's
old, quaint and should no longer be expected to apply, well, then, that's
exactly the point! The institution of marriage as it is practiced in the
real world is a culturally defined institution, not biblically defined, as a
reading of the above quotation should make quite clear, and it is high time
we recognize and face up to the cold reality that cultural values have
changed since the bible was written, and the institution of marriage has
changed along with it. Gay marriage is simply part of that evolutionary
process of social progress.
4. Gay sex is unnatural. This argument, often encoded in the very name of
sodomy statutes, betrays a considerable ignorance of behavior in the animal
kingdom. The fact is that among the approximately 1500 animal species whose
behavior has been extensively studied, homosexual behavior in animals has
been described in at least 450 of those species. It runs the gamut, too,
ranging from occasional displays of affection to life-long pair bonding
including sex and even adopting and raising orphans, going so far as the
rejection by force of potential heterosexual partners. The reality is that
it is so common that it begs for an explanation, and sociobiologists have
proposed a wide variety of explanations to account for it. The fact that it
is so common also means that it has evolutionary significance, which applies
as much to humans as it does to other animal species.
5. A man making love to another man betrays everything that is masculine.
Well, I've known (and dated) plenty of very masculine gay men in my day,
including champion bull-riding rodeo cowboys and a Hell's Angel biker type,
who, if you suggested he is a limp-wristed fairy, would likely rip your head
off and hand it to you. There was a long-honored tradition of gay
relationships among the tough and macho cowboys of the Old West, and many
diaries exist, detailing their relationships. In fact, the Autrey Museum of
the Old West in Los Angeles recently did an exhibition of this little-told
story. Plenty of masculine, respected movies stars are gay. Indeed, Rock
Hudson was considered the very archtype of a masculine man. Came as quite a
shock to a lot of macho-men to find out he was gay! So what's wrong with all
these kinds of men expressing love for each other? Why is that so wrong? A
society that devalues love devalues that upon which civilized society itself
is based. Should any form of that love for one another be discouraged?
The base fear here is that of rape and a loss of control or loss of
masculine status. This is instinctual and goes right to the core of our
being as primates. If you examine what happens in many animal species,
especially displays of dominance in other primate species, dominance
displays often have sexual overtones. When, for example, in many species of
primates, a subordinate male is faced with aggression by a dominant male,
the dominant male will bite the subordinate, causing him to squeal in pain,
drop the food (or the female) and present his rump. This is an act of
submission, and it is saying to the whole troupe that the subordinate is
just that - subordinate.
It has been suggested that homophobia is an instinctual fear of being raped
by someone that the homophobe regards as lower than him in status. And the
notion that a gay man might rape him is an instinctual fear.
This happens in humans just as it does in other primates. It is the cause of
homosexual rape in prisons. Prison rape is not an act of sex as much as it
is an assertion of dominance and a means of control. Nearly all of the men
who aggressively rape other men in a prison setting actually revert to
promiscuous heterosexual sex once they're on the outside.
So is this something straight men should fear from gay men? Well, relax, all
you straight guys. You've nothing to worry about. The vast majority of gay
men prefer sex in the same emotional setting you do as a straight man with a
woman - as a part of the expression of love, affection and commitment. We'
re not out to rape you or force you into a subordinate position. The
majority of gay men don't want sex with you because we're looking for the
same thing in a sexual relationship that you do - the love and affection of
a partner. Since we're not likely to get that from you, you're not desirable
to us and you have nothing to fear from us. The small minority of us (and
it's a very small minority) who enjoy sex with straight men understand your
fears and are not going to have sex with you unless it's clearly and
completely on a peer-to-peer basis and your requirement for full and
complete consent and need for discretion is honored.
6. The thought of gay sex is repulsive. This is the so-called "ick factor."
Well, it will come as some surprise to a lot of heterosexuals to find out
that, to a lot of gays, the thought of heterosexual sex is repulsive! But
does that mean the discomfort of some gays to heterosexual couples should be
a reason to deny heterosexuals the right to marry? I don't think so, even
though the thought of a man kissing a woman is rather repulsive to many
homosexuals! Well then, why should it work the other way? Besides, the same
sexual practices that gays engage in are often engaged in by heterosexual
couples anyway. Prompting the ever-popular gay T-shirt: "SO-DO-MY -- SO DO
MY neighbors, SO DO MY friends."
7. They might recruit. The core cause of this fear is the result of the fact
that most virulent, even violent homophobes are themselves repressed
sexually, often with same sex attractions. One of the recent studies done at
the University of Georgia among convicted killers of gay men has shown that
the overwhelmingly large percentage of them exhibit sexual arousal when
shown scenes of gay sex. The fear, then, for the homophobe is that he
himself might be gay, and might be forced to face that fact. The homophobia
is as internalized as it is externalized - bash the queer and you don't have
to worry about being aroused by him.
The fear of recruitment is baseless because it is based on a false premise -
that gay people recruit. We don't. We don't recruit because we know from
our own experience that sexual orientation is inborn, and can't be changed
to any significant degree. Indeed, the attempts by psychologists, counselors
and religious therapy and support groups to change sexual orientation have
all uniformly met with failure - the studies that have been done of these
therapies have never shown any significant results, and usually create
psychological damage in the process, which is why they are uniformly
condemned by mental health professional associations. So the notion that
someone can be changed from straight to gay is quite unlikely. Yet there
remains that deep, dark fear that somehow, someone might be.
8. Gay marriage would undermine sodomy laws. Because it would be hard to
justify, before a court, allowing a couple to marry and then legally bar
them from having sexual relations, many conservative religionists privately
oppose gay marriage in part because it would undermine the legal basis for
sodomy laws, which, even though they have been struck down as
unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court (Lawrence vs. Texas), they are
still dreamed of by those who would seek to legalize discrimination against
gays - and are occasionally still enforced in some states, in spite of the
fact that the laws have been invalidated and doing so is quite illegal and
opens the state to civil lawsuit. In several states, gays convicted under
these invalidated laws are even still being required to register as sex
offenders.
9. Gay marriage would legitimize homosexuality. This presumes that
homosexuality is something other than simply a normal variation of human
development. The reality is that every mental health association has
recognized that homosexuality is a perfectly normal variation on how humans
develop, and there is now a substantial body of evidence from science that
there are sound reasons why it has evolved, and why it is not selected
against in evolutionary pressure. It is not perverted, it does not degrade
human culture, it is not a threat to humankind in any way. All those
stereotypes, long cultivated by homophobes and religious bigots, have been
disproven both by experience and by scientific research, but that does not
prevent the homophobe from holding to them dearly. And allowing state
sanction in the form of marriage, threatens the stereotype by undermining
the justification for it.
At the end of the day, the opposition to gay marriage stems ultimately from
a deep-seated homophobia in American culture, borne almost entirely out of
religious prejudice. While many Americans do not realize that that
homophobia exists to the extent that it does, it is a very real part of
every gay person's life, just like racism is a very real part of every black
person's life. It is there, it is pervasive, and it has far more serious
consequences for American society than most Americans realize, not just for
gay people, but for society in general. |
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