The arguments being used by the Christian Right today against gay marriage are not unique or sui generis. These arguments are an integral part of how the Christian Right views the world and they have used the exact same arguments in the past - for example, when they were opposing the liberalization of divorce laws.

In Ungodly Women: Gender and the First Wave of American Fundamentalism, Betty A. Deberg writes:

To curb divorce, fundamentalist leaders argued that divorce laws should be tightened, divorced individuals should be treated as criminals and brought to trial, and the public censure and ostracization of those who had divorced outside the law of Jesus.

The primary strategy these conservative Protestants employed against divorce was the use of religious sanctions. The first line of the argument was to claim that divorce was a religious question rather than a purely civil matter. ... The religious and moral grounds of their opposition to divorce lay, they argued, in the teachings of Jesus recorded in the New Testament. Divorce was permissible only on the ground of adultery, and remarriage of the adulterer was prohibited.

What Deberg describes here sounds remarkably like what is occurring in America today — but she is describing events almost a century in the past. Conservative Christians were desperate to keep people from having the choice to dissolve marriages, especially the women who were gaining more and more social rights, but they ultimately failed.

Today divorce is much easier than it was in the past because society has decided that divorce is a civil matter, subject to civil laws voted on by our elected representatives — not religious laws subject to the interpretation of unelected religious leaders. That’s exactly how it should be and we should all be happy that American divorce laws were not placed under the control of religious leaders in a sharia-style situation.

It’s unfortunate that similar arguments are being made once again in the context of gay marriage, but it’s also not surprising because the Christian Right subscribes to an absolutist religion which allows no compromises. For the Christian Right, all of a person’s life must be subjected to narrow religious laws and doctrines. The existence of a civil, secular sphere of life where one can escape religion is unacceptable to them — and that’s why, in the end, their most basic goal is to eliminate that sphere by any means necessary. They oppose science that doesn’t accept their religious assumptions, they oppose secular laws, and they oppose a civil government which doesn’t define social categories along their religious lines.

 

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