Why Do You Really Oppose Gay Marriage?

People who oppose gay marriage offer lots of different reasons for why they don't want it to become legal. A great many of those reasons are either religious or rely upon religious premises - but does that mean that the real reasons are genuinely religious? Could it instead be that there are other reasons and religion is just being used as an excuse?

Leonard Pitts Jr. made such an argument in a column in the Miami Herald. Pitts observed that many people use the Bible in their arguments against gay marriage, but they don’t follow many of the other commands in the same Bible — giving rise to the supposition that the Bible isn’t the source of their objections:

So don’t hide behind the Bible. Let’s just be honest here, you and me. Why do you oppose gay marriage, really? It just feels wrong to you, doesn’t it? At some visceral level, it just seems to offend something fundamental. ... I will, though, point out that once upon a time, the same gut-level sense of wrong -- and for that matter, the same Bible -- was used to keep Jews from swimming in the community pool, women from voting and black people from riding at the front of the bus. All those things once felt as profoundly offensive to some people as gay marriage does to you right now.

People tend to forget just what prejudice in the past has done, refusing to acknowledge that their own prejudices might not be any better than the prejudices of others. People also tend to forget — very conveniently — just how many prejudices and how much discrimination in the past were firmly rooted in Christians' interpretation of the Bible. Both slavery and segregation were, for Americans, a part of what they considered a traditional Christian worldview. Opposition to both was treated as opposition to Christianity and a godly order for human society.

 

Gay Rights & Gay Marriage:

• Marriage: Religious Rite or Civil Right?
• Gay Rights & Marriage News
• Gay Rights Polls
• Books On Gays, Homosexuality
• Gay Rights & Marriage Timeline
• Evangelical Christianity & Homosexuality
• Catholicism & Homosexuality

 

Arguments Against Gay Marriage:

• What's The Point of Marriage, Gay or Straight?
• Definition of Marriage in 1886
• What is a Marriage Between a Man and a Woman?
• Marriage is for Raising Children?
• Will Gay Marriage Undermine the Institution of Marriage?
• Are Gay Couples are Unnatural?
• Marriage is Sacred and a Sacrament?