Why every argument against gay marriage is wrong

We have arrived at a historic moment.  The Supreme Court finally heard arguments challenging states’ rights to deny marriage licenses to gay couples and to refuse to recognize those couples’ legal marriages performed in other jurisdictions.  I should be overjoyed that we are perhaps approaching a national moment that will resolve, once and for all, another instance of blatant institutionalized prejudice.

And yet, I’m furious!  As the case was presented, attorneys for the states had to make their case; naturally, the whole “the Bible says no” fallacy wasn’t really viable in front of the SCOTUS, so instead we heard horrific bigotry and mind boggling irrationality dressed up like proper argument.

For the benefit of anyone that needs to explain to somebody else why there is no argument against gay marriage that is both rational and morally palatable (or for gay marriage opponents interested in being outraged), here is why every argument against gay marriage is wrong.

“It will destabilize procreation as the center of family units, and nuclear families are the basis of society.” 

First off, this is a utilitarian question, which has no proper place in what is clearly a discussion of human rights.  A quick primer on the difference between utilitarian considerations and considerations of rights:

Utility questions ask how to achieve the best outcome – will invading Iraq lead to peace?  Will bailing out Greece stabilize the Eurozone?  Will signing an FTA with a bunch of Asian countries strengthen the US economy? Rights questions ask what individual people should be allowed to take or what actions individuals should not be subjected to – should gay people be allowed to marry each other?  Should women be able to vote?  Should police be able to beat up black people?

Naturally, sometimes these sorts of questions interact with each other.  Often utilitarian choices infringe on well established rights – as when Japanese Americans were deprived of their right to freedom of movement and sent to internment camps during World War II, or when many Americans became political prisoners in their own country during the anti-communist fear mongering époque.  Two things are true about both of these examples (and which I believe are true in most acknowledged cases where utilitarian concerns trumped rights) – first, they occurred during a time when people were terrified of an external enemy and felt the country to be in a state of emergency; second, in retrospect, they are horrible national embarrassments that are universally acknowledged to have been tremendous mistakes.

So back to gay marriage – questions of rights are not about asking what’s best for the world or society.  Rights questions are about putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, and thinking, “If I was that person, what basic freedoms should I be able to expect?”

Even beyond the wrong-headedness of asking these sorts of questions in a debate about rights, there are other problems with this argument.  For one, there is no data to support this utilitarian prediction.  In some states, gay marriage has been legal for a decade or more – can somebody show me the stats about society collapsing or birth rate plunging in Vermont or Massachusetts?  For another thing, there is no reproductive requirement for straight couples to marry – no fertility testing required, no letter of intent to procreate.

Can you imagine how horrified the world would be if Americans decided that sterile people couldn’t get married because it would undermine the reproductive basis for marital unions?

“Children will be better off with a male and female parent; men and women bring different perspectives to parenting.”  

If you’ve been reading carefully, you’ll notice that this is also a utilitarian question, and so has no business being part of this conversation (see above).  It suffers from some of the same issues as the previous question – first, a lack of any substantial data to support the assertion, and second a ridiculous double standard that we want to place on gay people, but not on straight people.

The gist of this argument is that kids will be most likely to thrive if they have one mom and one dad – and yet we allow straight couples to make all sorts of decisions that break this social arrangement.  Straight people can have children out of wedlock and never see each other again.  Married couples can get divorced.  Women can conceive using fertility procedures and never have any contact with a man.  According to the above argument, all of these choices shouldn’t be legal because they create a non-ideal parental arrangement for the resulting parents.

And yet, no one is trying to amend their state constitutions to entrench these expectations on straight people.  Why?  Because all of these utilitarian arguments are just flimsy pretexts to cover fundamental discrimination on the basis of sexual preference.  If anyone took any of these arguments seriously, they would also be crusading against divorce and in vitro fertilization.

“States that don’t want gay marriage shouldn’t have it imposed on them.” 

Finally, an argument about rights! Except that this too, is a logical fallacy.  The general premise here is that people shouldn’t have others’ morality imposed on them; citizens in Ohio and Michigan (both part of the suit in front of the Court) shouldn’t be subjected to the moral and social judgments of people in Massachusetts and Vermont (and Idaho, and 33 other states).

There are two problems with this argument.  First, states aren’t people.  When states choose to ban gay marriage, they don’t represent the moral sensibility of one state, or of one hundred percent of the population of that state; that choice made by Michigan, Ohio, and other states imposes a particular morality on millions of citizens in those states who find it reprehensible.  I, for example, live in Atlanta, and the Atlanta metro area is broadly supportive of gay marriage; if Atlanta was a state and gay marriage was on the ballot, it would pass with flying colors.  More than a third of Georgia’s population (more than 6 million people now) live in the Atlanta metro area, but we as a community don’t get a legal environment that represents our values because we are arbitrarily lumped together as a political unit with 9 million other people outside of Atlanta who have more conservative views.

Second, allowing gay marriage doesn’t impose anything on anybody.  This is the equivalent of saying we shouldn’t have imposed black peoples’ right to vote on poor innocent white people who didn’t like it and were upset about how it might affect society.  A permissive legal environment allows each individual to define for her or himself what they think is appropriate, and to act according to their own values – straight people can marry straight people, gay people can marry gay people.  A restrictive legal environment imposed the values of one part of the population on another part of the population – straight people can marry straight people, gay people can suck it up.

The only people trying to impose their values on others are the bigots standing in the way of inevitable human progress.  Hopefully they’ll live long enough to be ashamed when it becomes obvious that contemporary opponents of gay marriage are standing on the same moral and legal ground as apologists for slavery.