WELL, HERE WE GO
Massachusetts' Supreme Court has, predictably, overreached--this time overturning several thousand years of cultural heritage, tradition and law in formulating a new definition of marriage that is, essentially, without meaning. If its decision somehow becomes the law of the land, marriage as an institution with any legal standing or meaning will evaporate over the next few decades.
To be sure, people will still get married, but they will increasingly get married for reasons having little or nothing to do with the institution's purpose, which is to provide a stable context in which to usher in and civilize future generations. Yes, people do that now, but allowing men to marry each other and women to marry each other virtually guarantees yet more abuse of the institution, and therefore less meaning within it. And to be sure, we heterosexuals have done our part over the past several decades to undermine marriage, from no-fault divorce and all that. But the fact remained, until today, that marriage was meant to create families that were geared to socialize children and raise them into functioning members of society. Now, marriage's purpose will be...? Well, pretty much anything anyone wants it to be, but most likely some form of extracting benefits from state and employer. How romantic.
In the next few years, as the initial backlash gives way to the hard fact of meaningless marriage and the social confusion that will follow, religious conservatives (the demonized "Christian right," which takes it on the chin from more political angles more often than terrorists these days) will be marginalized or will swallow the adder and go along to get along. Our churches will come under attack from the Virginia Postrels of the world--intelligent people without principle or a sense of tradition, people who seldom set foot in an evangelical setting yet feel qualified to pontificate on our deficiencies, and who place style above all else. We will be forced, not requested, but forced one way or another, to either permit and then accept and then condone gay marriage, or we will be shut down. If we utter a peep in protest, we will be prosecuted as hate criminals. That's not possible today, but it is of a piece with general trends.
Or if persecution isn't the rule, then the church will probably lose its power to conduct marriages. It will all be in the name of fairness, naturally, and in the name of separation of church and state. Adam and Steve will petition their local Baptist congregation to allow them to marry in their building. The Baptists will refuse. Adam and Steve will sue, and the court will so rule that while it cannot force the Baptists to allow the ceremony to take place in their privately-held property, it can take away Baptists' function as marriage facilitators. Preachers and priests will lose the ability to pronounce anyone man and wife so that some government official can pronounce us all one big happy married conglomerate, with full health coverage for all.
I'm being facetious, but not by much. The fact is we're looking at the beginning of a pretty ugly turn: Either gays get what they want and then turn to demand still more, or they don't get what they want and marriage survives, battered but not broken by the experience. Either way, gay marriage opponents--who are not, by the way, all evangelical Christian righties--will look like the bad guys, proponents get to cast themselves in the role of tolerant advocate and gays themselves get to play the victim. The real victim will be marriage itself, and possibly future generations that will grow up under some truly non-nuclear family arrangements, but who cares about that? Abstractions mean little when feelings rule.
We will likely see the Massachusetts legislature knuckle under and pass laws officially recognizing gay marriage, or we will see the court force the legislature to do so. We will see gay couples fly up to Massachusetts to get married and then return to their homes in Alabama to see how far the Full Faith and Credit clause goes. Eventually the United States Supreme Court will pull another Roe, and we'll all be locked in yet another political feedback loop. And all of this to satisfy a minority of a minority against the wishes of the majority. Democracy these days seems to work in adverse proportions--the fewer numbers you have, the more likely you are to get your way, and the more numbers you have, the more likely you are to be marginalized. How else understand why America's 30 to 40 million evangelicals take so much abuse at the hands of the extreme ends of the political and moral spectrum? Fiscal conservatives and liberals may not agree on much, but they do see eye to eye on one thing--we evangelical Christians are the worst thing going.
Why, it was just last night I caught a snippet of political Rasputin Dick Morris opining on the future fortunes of the GOP. He said--and I'm not making this up--the Republicans could actually start to win elections if they dumped the Christian right. That's darn near a verbatim quote, but while I got the words close to right Morris gets the facts entirely wrong. Maybe he missed 1994, and 2000, and 2002 and isn't reading the numbers for 2004--all years in which the GOP either won or is likely to win, with its Christian base firmly intact. But in his wish to see us marginalized because he just doesn't like us, he'll lie, or bend the data, whatever. Chameleons like Morris just don't like people with principle, and say what you want about us, we Christian righties do espouse coherent principles. We don't always live up to them, but we do advocate them.
The gay marriage debate will exacerbate religious tensions further. If it ends with full sanction for gay marriage, it effectively tears the heart out of our cultural foundations. If it doesn't, well, expect more vitriol from all sides, continued legal challenges, more anger, far more heat in American politics at the expense of light. Whatever the outcome, it won't be pretty.
MUST-READS: Stanley Kurtz on the political implications of Goodridge, and Maggie Gallagher on the court's misreading of the purpose of marriage, among other things.