Tag Archives: Same-Sex Marriage

Obama’s Same-Sex Problem

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A majority of evangelical Christians across the broad spectrum of evangelicalism (liberal to moderate to conservative) OPPOSE same-sex marriage if the results of a new Calvin College poll on religion and public life are to be believed. Forty-eight percent of liberal to moderate evangelicals oppose same-sex marriage.

This poses a significant problem for Barack Obama’s outreach efforts to evangelicals. On the same day he announces that he would expand President Bush’s faith-based initiatives, there surfaces a letter the senator from Illinois wrote to the Alice B. Toklas LGBT Democratic Club in California in which Obama says he supports…

“…extending fully equal rights and benefits to same-sex couples under both state and federal law. That is why I support repealing the Defense of Marriage Act [DOMA] and the ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’ policy, and the passage of fully inclusive laws to protect LGBT Americans from hate crimes and employment discrimination. And that is why I oppose the divisive and discriminatory efforts to amend the California Constitution, and similar efforts to amend the U.S. Constitution or those of other states.”

Colin Hansen, writing for Justin Taylor’s Between Two Worlds blog:

The New Republic reports that these stands make Obama far more favorable to gay rights than were the Democratic running mates in 2004, Sen. John Kerry and Sen. John Edwards. Hugh Hewitt weights in with the doomsday scenario: “If Obama is elected and he leads majorities in the House and Senate to repeal DOMA, eight judges in two states–California and Massachusetts–will have reversed 3,000 years of law and culture in the West.” Peter Wehner criticizes Obama for equating support for traditional marriage with bigotry. “He has now taken a position that strikes me as fairly extreme: same-sex marriages ought to be imposed by the courts, even if the citizens of that state object–thereby making an already-contentious social issue even more contentious.”

The Inarticulate John McCain

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For weeks now I have been wondering out loud why presidential candidates find it necessary to lower the standards of the presidency by making appearences on the basest of television venues. In recent weeks John McCain has ventured into the hostile environs of Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, Stephen Colbert’s Colbert Report, and now in what must confirm McCain’s insatiable appetite for self-flagellation, this week he made a very painful appearence on the Ellen Degeneres show where he endured a verbal flogging around the issue of traditional vs. homosexual marriage:

[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lXrizVZW2E”]

Rather than defend marriage on moral principle as the union of a man and a woman for the purpose of procreation, the establishment of the home as the basis of a civil society, and as a union entered “before God” and in accordance with His laws, McCain offers a compromise which suggests that marriage is first and foremost a “legal agreement” for the purpose of sharing insurance and decision-making, the benefits of which are readily available to same-sex couples. Such a position denies conservative principles relative to the defense of traditional marriage, the first principle of which that marriage is fundamentally about reproduction, providing a context for the stability of society in the rearing of children who have been birthed as a result of the sexual union of a man and a woman.

Ellen denies this fundamental principle of marriage, arguing for same-sex marriage on the basis of erotic love, grounding her argument in the mistaken idea that marriage is a civil right that has been denied to sodomizers and lesbians in the same way this country denied the freedom of slaves and the suffrage of blacks and women:

I think that it is looked at, and some people are saying the same, that blacks and women did not have the right to vote. I mean, women just got the right to vote in 1920. Blacks didn’t have the right to vote until 1870, and it just feels like there is this old way of thinking that we are not all the same. We are all the same people – all of us. You’re no different than I am. Our love is the same.

There is absolutely no correlation between the equality denied blacks and women and marriage being denied to sodomizers and lesbians. All humans, regardless of ethnic or gender differences, have been enowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights on the basis of their common HUMANITY. When Ellen argues that “we are all the same people” she is absolutely correct that in terms of our HUMANITY we are all equal, but she misapplies the equality standard to SEXUAL BEHAVIOR, insisting that there is no difference between the erotic love of homosexual persons and that of heterosexual persons. She couldn’t be more wrong.

Ellen is equal to me in terms of personhood and the individual human rights that accompany personhood. It is a fundamental denial of the human person to deny blacks and women equal status. But no one is denying Ellen and her lover status as persons or the rights that inure to them as human persons. The rights of marriage inure to those who can meet the biological standard necessary for entering a physical union that, with all biological standards being equal, can produce offspring. This is fundamentally the nature of marriage.

To say that because we share the same rights as human persons makes us fundamentally the same in nature and physicality is illogical. I am not the same as Ellen in terms of sexuality. She is a female and I am a male, and as such there are fundamental differences BIOLOGICALLY between us. The female body is capable of carrying and bringing to life the seeds of reproduction, a feat my body cannot accomplish. Have my rights therefore been violated? Obviously not. You can’t fool Mother Nature (i.e., GOD).

To argue that same-sex attraction is a fundamental human right in the same way suffrage is, is nothing more than changing the subject. John McCain allowed Ellen to change the subject and in doing so demonstrated that he is a poor apologist for conservatism on one of the key issues that really, really matters. The only response he could muster was to congratulate Ellen on articulating her position in a very eloquent fashion. Too bad he failed to articulate his position at all.