The Conservative Case

The laws against homosexual activity and same-sex cohabitation are a dead letter in the US. No policemen are kicking down doors and forcibly separating same-sex couples. Therefore, same-sex couples currently do enjoy the freedom to take upon themselves the bond of lifelong sexual exclusivity: I have sex only with you for as long as you live, and you hve sex only with me for as long as I live. If one of us breaks that vow, the other is free to leave the relationship and start a new one with someone else. That agreement, and only that agreement, constitutes marriage. With it, a marriage is in place; without it, whatever relationship there is, regardless of what people call it, is not a marriage.

Well, no. It also implies sharing household responsibilities, caring for the other person when they are sick, being sexually available when they are not sick, and pooling money to some degree.

Same-sex couples aren’t after the right to be left alone, because they’re already being left alone. They aren’t after the freedom to marry, because in the true sense of the word marriage, they already have that; nobody will stop them if they try.

Part of this has to do with Federal benefits; the rest has become a food-fight over a word.

The debate is not about that, and has not been about that ever since the SCotUS threw out the laws against same-sex relationships and cohabitation. The debate is about access to privileges that have been granted to traditional couples, which non-traditional couples demand. They want the financial, legal, and social benefits of marriage to be granted by everyone, even the unwilling via government coercion. It has not escaped my notice that, for instance, the push for same-sex marriage took on its recent vigor after the marriage penalty in US tax law was substantially reduced, and not before.

I think that’s a coincidence; that push could only occur before the stigma against homosexuality had been reduced to a significant degree, which was a recent development.

I am perfectly fine with the government granting the benefits of marriage to other domestic arrangements, and in fact many of the legal benefits should be available to couples whose bond is not sexual in any way (such as a single person taking care of a widowed and invalid parent, two members of a religious order, etc.). As for the financial benefits, I am mostly interested in keeping the total costs down and keeping the system as honest as possible. The US military justifies its prosecution of adulterers for this reason, to stop people from claiming marriage for no reason other than to claim the financial benefits of marriage; the military reasons that it is fraudulent to claim to be married to one person and sleep with others.

But in a situation wherein a straight couple would get x benefit, the gay couple should get x benefit, if that is the only difference.

Where I am concerned, however, is the legal standing of private actors whose religious or other moral principles require that they recognize only traditional couples as married, and withold recognition from other arrangments, in deed as well as in thought and word. A private school, run by a church, should be able to require that its employees not cohabit with sexual partners (or even have sexual partners) to whom they are not married in the eyes of that church; it should not be compelled to abandon its religious conscience in order to operate legally. The First Amendment means absolutely nothing if a law can forbid the practice of a religious teaching solely because that teaching displeases some.

Agreed–this entire thing should be done only with very strict religious protections in place. Which is why the government should not be throwing that word around, since it means different things to different people. If the state merely grants the civil union, but marriage is only conferred by one’s family and church, we wouldn’t be facing a situation wherein religious folk had the concern that they would be forced to call partnerships “marriages” that are not such WRT their own moral codes.

Nor would we be facing the gay argument that the state was withholding that label from them, yet granting it to straights.

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