Never underestimate the power of political correctness to banish rationality from the field. Gay marriage is the latest symptom of a PC outbreak.
Last month the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court claimed that gay marriage was constitutionally required. Then we had San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsome carrying out hundreds of attempts at gay weddings, with Mayor Jason West of New Paltz, New York, trying his hand at it, too. The weddings have all been illegal, but the real scandal is the reasoning our oh-so-current citizens are using to justify them.
One constant refrain is that marriage is only about a "loving and committed relationship," gender no object. Really? If that is the main criterion why couldn't brothers marry sisters or one man many women? One media commentator said that those relationships wouldn't work because they were against the law (apparently forgetting that gay marriage is, too) and that they were too extreme. But having already rejected any kind of standard other than "true love" he leaves himself with nothing to back his opinion except a gut repugnance.
Let's take a real-life example. Kathryn Harrison wrote an autobiography titled "The Kiss," in which she reveals the four-year, voluntary sexual relationship she had with her father starting when she was 20. Suppose she and her father applied to Mayor West for a wedding license. On what grounds could he possibly refuse them that would not equally apply to a man wishing to marry a man? Having stepped onto the slippery slope, advocates of gay marriage almost immediately slide to the bottom.
Undaunted, our free-thinkers pule that somehow limiting marriage to a man and woman restricts their rights. But just as certain people have no right to marry each other (see above examples; you can think of others on your own), even if it makes them "equal" to married couples, so there is no right for a man to marry a man or a woman to marry a woman.
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Marriage has several purposes, one of which is to ensure the health and safety of children. As columnist nonpareil Joseph Sobran points out, even if there were a society that openly and universally embraced homosexuality, it would still have to have a marriage arrangement for those men and women who wanted children.
Telling parents, for example, that they cannot marry their children doesn't render them as "less human," but as ineligible and inappropriate as partners in such marital relationships.
Defenders of gay marriage argue that it doesn't threaten anyone else, so we shouldn't be concerned. Unfortunately this point also applies to polygamy and incestuous marriages. Therefore, anything goes?
Professor Larry Peterson in the Feb. 29 Forum tries another critical approach. Marriage has changed so much over the centuries, he maintains (and cites a long list of examples), that gay marriage is just one more step in the series. Somehow he overlooks the point that all his cases still deal with man-woman relationships, not man-man or woman-woman. He confuses quantitative with qualitative change.
I queried both a staunch, well-informed Catholic layman and a local Catholic official about Peterson's claim that the Catholic Church performed same-sex unions that were nearly identical to its heterosexual variety. Both claim his statement is baseless.
The PC push for gay marriage reinforces the point made many years ago concerning gay activists: while they seemed to be working only toward tolerance of their sexual orientation, their ultimate goal was total acceptance by society. And so it has been. Gays now present us this false dilemma: be a bigot, or accept homosexual behavior as utterly normal.
Nelson is a Fargo postal worker and regular contributor to The Forum's commentary pages. He can be reached at r.cnelson@702com.net
