I was thinking this morning about the matter of gay marriage. Two things seem clear to me: 1) that civilly they have the right to demand a legal arrangement identical to that of heterosexually married couples: 2) that the use of the word “marriage” constitutes a cultural and not a civil demand. It constitutes a demand for equality culturally and socially, and not just legally.
This led to what I will call the insight that the essence of Liberalism is the protection of culture within a system of law. What the First Amendment tells us, in effect, is that any and all statements are allowable, but that none shall be coerced. You will neither be prohibited from believing things, nor compelled to pretend to believe in them.
The Bible plainly prohibits sodomy. Self evidently, the word itself is from the Bible. Compelling the use of the word marriage is equivalent to compelling conformity to a set of values you do not share.
Yet plainly, the set of values in San Francisco or Columbus, Ohio would be perfectly congruent with allowing the word marriage.
The essence of true Liberalism is national protections from coercion, but allowing local permutations of permissions. All powers not granted to the Federal Government were to devolve to the States, many of whom banned sodomy (incidentally for heterosexuals as well, referring to the necessary non-missionary position permutations of the sex act demanded by realities of anatomy) until as recently as a decade or so ago. Logically, if you can explicitly criminalize it, you can explicitly legalize its fruition (sorry) in gay marriage.
The key point is that no heterogeneous group of people is ever going to agree on everything, so on some level of organization it has to come down to majority rule, as restricted by the foundational rights in our Bill of Rights. In principle, I would support local implementations of Sharia Law, if that’s what the people wanted, but only as limited by the Bill of Rights. No cruel and unusual punishment. No punishment for blasphemy. But if they want the government to pay a Muezzin to sound the call for prayer, and the taxpayers are OK with that, then in my view that should be perfectly legal. Self evidently, sedition could not be permitted either, but in principle that is my view.
For my part, personally, I am fine with gay marriage. I’m with Dolly Parton, who said “why shouldn’t they be allowed to be as miserable as the rest of us?”
It is the larger issues of principle that concern me.