Gay Marriage is Not a Civil Right

The debate on homosexual marriage continues to rage after the passage of California's Proposition 8 on Tuesday.

As we saw yesterday, gay rights activists have turned against black voters in the state, who voted in overwhelming numbers to preserve the traditional definition of marriage as that between one man and one woman. Well, it turns out that today's Los Angeles Times offers a look at black views on same-sex marriage, "For Many African Americans, It's Not a Civil Rights Issue":

For Trebor Healey, a 46-year-old gay man from Glendora, Tuesday's election was bittersweet.

He was thrilled that the nation elected its first African American president. But he was disappointed that black voters, traditionally among the most reliably liberal in the state, voted overwhelmingly to ban same-sex marriage.

He understands that there are differences between the civil rights battles of blacks and gays: For one thing, he notes, gay people have a much easier time blending in. Still, he says, he thinks it's sad that "people do not equate one civil rights struggle with another."

Many black voters didn't see it that way.

"I was born black. I can't change that," said Culver City resident Bilson Davis, 57, who voted for Proposition 8. "They weren't born gay; they chose it," he added ....

Los Angeles resident Christopher Hill, 50, said he was motivated by religion in supporting Proposition 8. Civil rights, he said, "are about getting a job, employment."

Gay marriage, he said, is not: "It's an abomination against God."

One of the common attacks on supporters of Prop 8 is that they're bigots, and folks on the left are incredulous that the same voters who supported Barack Obama could in turn reject homosexual marriage rights.

The truth is that if we recall the original foundation of marriage as a union of man and women for the central purpose of procreation, it makes sense that Yes on 8 supporters resist expanding a definition of rights to those who make a lifestyle choice.

Indeed, the effort to change the language of traditional civil rights to include gay marriage has been one of the most clever yet sinister elements of the same-sex marriage movement this last few years. Yet, as Eugene Rivers and Kenneth Johnson indicate, the equation of gay rights with the black feedom struggle - and the traditional civil rights agenda - is a fraud that cheapens the historic legacy for equal treatment under the law in the United States:

There is no evidence in the history and literature of the civil rights movement, or in its genesis in the struggle against slavery, to support the claim that the "gay rights" movement is in the tradition of the African-American struggle for civil rights ....

The extraordinary history of the United States as a slaveholding republic included the kidnapping and brutal transport of blacks from African shores, and the stripping of their language, identity, and culture in order to subjugate and exploit them. It also included the constitutional enshrining of these evils in the form of a Supreme Court decision--Dred Scott v. Sandford--denying to blacks any rights that whites must respect, and the establishment of Jim Crow and de jure racial discrimination after Dred Scott was overturned by a civil war and three historic constitutional amendments.

It is these basic facts that embarrass efforts to exploit the rhetoric of civil rights to advance the goals of generally privileged groups, however much they wish to depict themselves as victims. Whatever wrongs individuals have suffered because some Americans fail in the basic moral obligation to love the sinner, even while hating the sin, there has never been an effort to create a subordinate class subject to exploitation based on "sexual orientation."

It is precisely the indiscriminate promotion of various social groups' desires and preferences as "rights" that has drained the moral authority from the civil rights industry. Let us consider the question of rights. What makes a gay activist's aspiration to overturn thousands of years of universally recognized morality and practice a "right"? Why should an institution designed for the reproduction of civil society and the rearing of children in a moral environment in which their interests are given pride of place be refashioned to accommodate relationships integrated around intrinsically non-marital sexual conduct?

One must, in the current discussion, address directly the assertion of discrimination. The claim that the definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman constitutes discrimination is based on a false analogy with statutory prohibitions on interracial marriages in many states through much of the 20th century. This alleged analogy collapses when one considers that skin pigmentation is utterly irrelevant to the procreative and unitive functions of marriage. Racial differences do not interfere with the ability of sexually complementary spouses to become "one-flesh," as the Book of Genesis puts it, by sexual intercourse that fulfills the behavioral conditions of procreation. As the law of marital consummation makes clear, and always has made clear, it is this bodily union that serves as the foundation of the profound sharing of life at every level--biological, emotional, dispositional, rational, and spiritual--that marriage is. This explains not only why marriage can only be between a man and a woman, but also why marriages cannot be between more than two people--despite the desire of "polyamorists" to have their sexual preferences and practices legally recognized and blessed.

Moreover, the analogy of same-sex marriage to interracial marriage disregards the whole point of those prohibitions, which was to maintain and advance a system of racial subordination and exploitation. It was to maintain a caste system in which one race was relegated to conditions of social and economic inferiority. The definition of marriage as the union of a man and a woman does not establish a sexual caste system or relegate one sex to conditions of social and economic inferiority. It does, to be sure, deny the recognition as lawful "marriages" to some forms of sexual combining--including polygyny, polyandry, polyamory, and same-sex relationships. But there is nothing invidious or discriminatory about laws that decline to treat all sexual wants or proclivities as equal.

People are equal in worth and dignity, but sexual choices and lifestyles are not. That is why the law's refusal to license polygamous, polyamorous, and homosexual unions is entirely right and proper. In recognizing, favoring, and promoting traditional, monogamous marriage, the law does not violate the "rights" of people whose "lifestyle preferences" are denied the stamp of legal approval. Rather, it furthers and fosters the common good of civil society, and makes proper provision for the physical and moral protection and nurturing of children.

I have no illusions that such rigorous argumentation and logic will convince homosexual rights advocates that gays face no discimination on the question of marriage rights.

But as we can see, the homosexual movement is attempting to create a right to marriage that has no basis in historical practice, and such attempts trivialize the bloody march to equality Americans have endured and overcome.

This is a lesson gay activists should consider, for when 70 percent of blacks in California - the nation's most liberal, trend-setting state - oppose the demands of an extremely vocal radical minority, it's a pretty good indicator that the movement for same-sex marriage rights falls outside the bounds of both traditional law and universal morality.