Of Bigots and Bible Bashers

Posted on 09 August 2010

Everyone who’s been paying attention to the news for the past week knows that federal judge Vaughn Walker overturned the California state constitutional amendment known as Proposition 8 which stated that within that state, marriage would be defined between a man and a woman.

What some of you guys may not realize is that I think the judge is wrong.  And I think I have good reasons to think so.  But I’m not going to go into them here.  If you want to know a little bit about that, I suggest watching the Youtube video I’ve linked below, which starts about 10-11 minutes in.  For the purposes of this post, I just want to point out something I realized this week while talking with various people about what happened.

And that’s that people who are in favor of same-sex marriage intuit that people who don’t want equal treatment of different groups of people must be bigots do so in the same way people on my side intuit that homosexuality is a sin and maybe we as a culture shouldn’t be encouraging it (Note: These are not the best arguments for either position).  It’s because both sides are intuiting a conclusion based upon their most basic starting point; people on my side because of their religious and/or moral convictions and people on the other side because of their sense of fair play.

What I would love to do is find a way to get people past their intuition, which is fine as far as it goes, but with a subject like this it’s more prone to get in the way of understanding the other side’s point of view than it is clarify the other side’s point of view.  And this keeps people from being able to dialogue about same-sex marriage in a civil manner.

Lay people on my side start with “the Bible says” because they think Biblical morality matches reality in the way that makes it the correct moral view.  And they don’t understand that culture doesn’t recognize the Bible as authoritative anymore.

People for same-sex marriage start with their sense of fair play because their attitudes toward marriage isn’t that marriage is done primarily to raise a family and build society, but that marriage is done primarily as a show of love towards a special one.  And if that’s what marriage is about, then why should we keep gays from being able to take that step as well?

What is important about this observation is that when you look between the lines, it becomes clear that one side’s motivations aren’t actually bigoted, and the other side’s motivations really aren’t to intentionally destroy the Judeo-Christian underpinnings of our country.  Let me explain.  These conclusions about the other side are mis-firings of our intuition, I think, because both sides actually have good reasons for doing what they do.  And I think their conclusions are as starkly different as they are because both sides have entirely different conceptions of what marriage is.  But our intuitions about the other side are based entirely on our own conception of what marriage is.  Here there is the disconnect, which means there’s more to the other side than is at first apparent, and they deserve to be heard out.  We should be evaluating the other side’s reasoning and conclusions on their own merits instead of on our own intuitions about them.

Once more and more people start to understand this and endeavor to understand the other side’s best moral reasoning before rendering judgment, then we will actually have better chances at being able to talk about same-sex marriage like adults instead of how the majority of the Twitterverse and Blogosphere are even now carrying on.

As for my writing goals… I’ve been distracted this week, with learning about this phenomenon and, if I’m being honest, with the novel Fatal Alliance (which is turning out to be pretty good) and spending time with friends in Active Worlds.

Some Same-Sex Marriage Resources
ThePublicDiscourse.com – Same-Sex Marriage and the Assault on Moral Reasoning

WhatsWrongWithTheWorld.Net – Some thoughts on Proposition 8

I’m actually on the look-out for pro-same-sex marriage articles that don’t fall into the ad hominem trap I’ve described above, yet make the best case for same-sex marriage.  If you find any well-reasoned ones, please post them in the comments.  Thanks!