IT’S A MATTER OF HOW YOU LOOK AT IT, I GUESS

The gay marriage thing is really burning up the blogosphere these days, so I figure it’s time I weigh in on it a little more. Donald Sensing has said a lot which I agree with on the matter; you can get to his thoughts here.

The gay marriage debate is another skirmish in the culture war, and in case my Christian siblings haven’t noticed, we’ve pretty much lost that war already. If you click on Sensing’s first link, you get a very good argument for his thesis that the rise of gay marriage doesn’t represent a threat to traditional marriages; rather, he contends, it’s an inevitable consequence of how traditional marriage has already broken down. Sensing credits the introduction of the Pill as the turning point in the sexual revolution. He says that the Pill allowed women to act out sexually without the fear that they would wind up having to raise a child alone. This, in turn, made women more willing to engage in sex, and made men less willing to submit to marriage, since sex was more readily available.

All of that somewhat presupposes that the only reason a woman gets married is in order to have a father for her babies, and the only reason a man gets married is to have ready access to sex. I’m not so sure about that, so I’m not entirely willing to say that better birth control is the reason why permarital cohabitation has become the norm in our culture. Birth control technology has only gotten better since the early 1960s, but lots of women in our culture still wind up having to raise children alone. Likewise, I’m sure there are plenty of men who would argue the claim that marriage necessarily leads to more sex. Most of them, however, probably don’t really remember what it’s like to be single.

Still, Sensing is right that we as a society have largely forfeited the right to decide if heterosexual activity between two unmarried people is legitimate or not. That particular genie is out of the bottle, and it isn’t going back in. It is, therefore, largely inevitable that society will eventually lose interest in assessing the moral probity of homosexual activity as well. We no longer see (heterosexual) marriage and reproduction as inherently linked. We recognize that people don’t just marry to “start a family” (i.e., have children) these days; indeed, many couples remain childless by choice or by biology. Yet no one really questions the legitimacy of those marriages.

So, the thinking goes, if marriage isn’t just for purposes of raising children, then what is the basis for denying same-sex couples its benefit? Clearly, there’s essentially one reason: A belief that homosexuals are somehow ontologically inferior to heterosexuals. Given this country’s history of dealing with those who claim one class of people is inferior or superior to another, it’s amazing that this hasn’t become a shooting war. (Then again, it probably will, if indeed it hasn’t already.)

It will not do for Christians to regard homosexuals as their ontological inferiors. Such a stance smacks of hypocrisy; you cannot simultaneous affirm Romans 3:23 (”for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”) and yet draw distinctions among different classes of sinners. According to the Bible, only those who “sin against the Holy Spirit” cannot be forgiven; while I knew a guy in college who was obsessed with proving that homosexuality was the sin against the Holy Spirit, I don’t know that anyone’s constructed an airtight proof of such.

But, at the same time, it’s not exactly like gay marriage has an imprimatur (or even a nihil obstat) from the Christian’s point of view. If there’s no compelling argument suggesting that homosexuality is the Big Enchilada of sins, there’s not exactly anything suggesting that it’s God-pleasing, either. So any attempts at greater tolerance of gay marriage must be tempered by the high probability that (a) homosexuality is Biblically proscribed, and (b) even if you can somehow convince yourself that it isn’t, there’s a lot of Christians who are going to see this as an extraordinary claim and therefore demand an extraordinary proof.

To put it in the terms in which the debate is so often framed these days, even if you can convince Christians that gay marriage is a matter of civil rights and not theology, efforts at persuasion will prove difficult because there’s not really a Galatians 3:28 (”There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus”) around which to build an argument. Anybody could look at at Gal. 3:28 and see that, even if one believed the odious “Hamitic Curse” justification of slavery, Jesus would have wiped out its effect by making all people stand in equal need of him.

But Jesus didn’t wipe out sin; he simply forgave it. And even if homosexuality isn’t the Big Enchilada, it would take the hermeneutical equivalent of Nadia Comaneci to vault over the idea that the Bible doesn’t really call homosexual activity a sin of some sort.

Yet, as many critics point out, there are all kinds of Old Testament laws which modern-day Christians do not observe–prohibitions against eating pork, wearing clothes made of more than one kind of fabric, even digging latrines in the midst of military encampments. It’s certainly fair to say that even the most devout Christians pick and choose elements of the (non-Decalogic) law to follow. And we know we shouldn’t do that; Paul in particular warned against the pitfalls of trying to cling to grace while enforcing the law. (He was talking about circumcision, generally, but the point is valid for any aspect of the law.)

So how do Christians proceed? Those who criticize the church are correct to complain that we apply the law selectively; they would be well to note that we apply it against the advice of the church’s first great theologian, as well. This may be a case of rendering to Caesar that which is Caesar’s; in other words, the wisest course may be to realize that society is going to do what society is going to do. The genie, as I’ve said before, is out of the bottle and enjoying life without confinement. But it isn’t just pragmatic to suggest that this battle isn’t worth fighting; the fact is, we don’t have the moral high ground we think we do. Mind you, we used to. Then we traded it for “relevance” back in the post-WWII era. We’re the ones that tried to de-spiritualize our religion in a misguided quest for social status (in the case of mainline denominations) or the impossibility of error (Catholicism and evangelicalism). We either embraced science or rejected it, rather than remaining involved with it but detached. Science has led us to a situation where marriage and reproduction are no longer intertwined; anti-scientificism has led us to a place where we can no longer communicate to our culture unless it’s on our own terms. Either way, we’ve got nothing to say on the matter or gay marriage.

Well, nothing anybody’s going to hear, anyway.