Gay Marriage – Obama Comes Out for Love. Do You?

“The word marriage has a connotation,” an Amendment One supporter insists (more on connotation later). “They can have the same right, but not the same name,” says another man. When Sampson suggests pronouncing same-sex unions as “marry-äzh,” both are immediately fine with that. Why? When gay marriage opponents argue that “that’s not what it means,” or insist that marriage is between a man and a woman, it is often dismissed as a thin cover for bigotry. But is there more to it than that? What’s in a name?

On April 11, David Blankenhorn and Elizabeth Marquardt (originally from NC) of the Institute for American Values in New York City and supporters of California’s “Proposition 8,” penned an op-ed for the Raleigh News and Observer opposing North Carolina’s Amendment One, writing:

In the California “Prop 8” case, David felt that he could testify on behalf of traditional man-woman marriage in good conscience, in part because California some time ago passed domestic partnership legislation to extend legal recognition to same-sex couples. He argued in favor of domestic partnerships, more commonly called civil unions, while also insisting that marriage, because of its unique role in uniting biological, social and legal parenthood – a great gift to our children – is its own institution, deserving of its own name, and should remain, as it has always been, the union of a man and a woman. [emphasis mine]

I submit — and the examples above suggest — that there is something more subtle going on than equal rights vs. bigotry in the argument about the definition of marriage. Blankenhorn says he supports equal rights for same-sex unions. But he opposes using marriage to describe them. Now, the horse is out of the barn on whether or not to use the term marriage in advocating equal rights for same-sex couples. The We Do campaign, for example, is built around having LGBT couples ask local Registers’ offices for marriage licenses. In part, because there are legal differences in how the federal government treats marriage nationwide as opposed to other legal, state-sanctioned arrangements. That’s an issue blogger Bob Hyatt of Portland, Oregon’s Evergreen Community addressed recently:

The State needs to get out of the “marriage” business. It should recognize that as long as it uses that term, and continues to privilege certain types of relationships over others this issue is going to divide us as a nation, and is only going to become more and more contentious. We need to move towards the system used in many European countries where the State issues nothing but civil unions to anyone who wants them, and then those who desire it may seek a marriage from the Church.

In past conversations, however, my suggestion (as a political strategy) about not using the word marriage in the fight for equality, or about inventing unique words for same-sex unions, was dismissed as relegating same-sex unions to second-class status. That puzzled me. Why worry about the verbiage as long as the legal rights and privileges are the same? Perhaps — and maybe few on either side consciously recognize it — this fight is over something more, something beyond the legal definition of marriage: sacredness.

Not that definitions don’t matter. Words mean something. Echoing the U.S. Supreme Court, Mitt Romney says, “Corporations are people, my friend,” and it sounds ludicrous. One hears people argue that marriage is only a union of one man and one woman. It is historically a male/female union, sure, but not necessarily involving only one of each sex. How many wives did Solomon have? 700? We have special words for multiple, opposite-sex unions: polyandry, polygyny, polygamy, etc. But not for describing woman-woman or man-man unions.

Bear with me here. Going back to Genesis 2, humans name things to distinguish this from that. It is basic cognitive processing, and marriage is an established mental construct. Those do not bend easily. Point to two men or two women and say marriage, and people like those in the examples above object, insisting that that is not what the word means. Is that bigotry? Maybe. For some, probably. But try this naming thought experiment (in your mind’s eye):

I hold up a cup and call it a box.
I hold up a plate and call it a bowl.
I hold up a spoon and call it a fork.
I hold up a kitten and call it a puppy.
I hold up a can and call it a jar.
I hold up a square and call it a circle, etc.

Trying that the other day induced a headache. Because the mind is a difference engine. It knows that even among similar things, this is not that.

When we see that opponents are unwilling to share the word marriage with LGBT couples, that is part of it. For them, two men or two women is not a marriage. First, because it conflicts with a mental construct fixed since childhood. It may be marriage-like, but it is different, requiring a separate name. But secondly, they oppose same-sex marriage because they refuse to accept that LGBT unions can be sacred.

Perhaps for a similar reason, LGBT friends balked at adopting alternate terms for their legal unions, terms that might decouple the fight for legal rights from social acceptance. They use gay marriage, same-sex marriage, or marriage equality instead of civil unions or domestic partnerships, and not just for the statutory differences. Because if same-sex unions are not marriage, they are not sacred and do not feel equal. It is a yearning buried in the sub rosa conversation. But in addition to legal equality, whether their relationships — their marriages — are sacred, whether neighbors in the community accept their unions as sacred is as meaningful for gay people as for everyone else. Civil union doesn’t quite cut it.

Still, if one’s goal is just to get to the other side of the mountain, going around or climbing the lowest pass will do. You don’t climb the steepest face without understanding that summiting makes getting to the other side harder. Recognition of LGBT relationships as sacred is a tougher climb, and not achievable through legislation anyway, any more than the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts settled the equality issue for African Americans. But by establishing their legal rights, passing those acts did lever open the door of acceptance a bit wider. On paper, at least. Recognition of sacredness for LGBT relationships will likely work the same way: over time.

(Cross-posted from Scrutiny Hooligans.)

Whenever these contentious arguments erupt, a common response from progressives is to bemoan the “circular firing squad” and point to the right, where this sort of self-destructive behavior is rarely ever seen. Instead, the right exhibits a fanatic message discipline that would have made the Politburo envious. Grover Norquist holds his famous “Wednesday meetings” where right-wing strategy and message are coordinated. Frank Luntz provides the talking points, backed by his research. And from there, and from numerous other nodes in the right-wing network, the message gets blasted out. Conservatives dutifully repeat the refrain, which becomes a cacophony that generates its own political force. Republicans ruthlessly use that message, that agenda, to shift the nation’s politics to the right, even as Americans themselves remain on the center-left of most issues.

“Can’t we be more like them?” ask these progressives who understandably grow tired of the Obama wars. The conservatives’ disciplined communications strategy typically gets ascribed to one of these factors. Some see it as an inherent feature of their ideology – the right is hierarchical, the left is anarchic. (Of course, the 20th century Communist movement disproved that.) Others see it as an inherent feature of their brains – conservatives are said to have an “authoritarian” brain where everything is black and white and where values and ideas are simply accepted from a higher-up, whereas liberals have brains that see nuance and prize critical thinking, making them predisposed to squabble instead of unite. And still others just see the conservatives as being smarter, knowing not to tear each other down, with the implication that progressives who engage in these bruising internal battles simply don’t know any better, or are so reckless as not to care.

Perhaps some of those factors are all at work. But I want to argue that the truth is far simpler. Conservatives simply understand how coalitions work, and progressives don’t. Conservative communication discipline is enabled only by the fact that everyone in the coalition knows they will get something for their participation. A right-winger will repeat the same talking points even on an issue he or she doesn’t care about or even agree with because he or she knows that their turn will come soon, when the rest of the movement will do the same thing for them.

Progressives do not operate this way. We spend way too much time selling each other out, and way too little time having each other’s back. This is especially true within the Democratic Party, where progressives share a political party with another group of people – the corporate neoliberals – who we disagree with on almost every single issue of substance. But within our own movement, there is nothing stopping us from exhibiting the same kind of effective messaging – if we understood the value of coalitions.

A coalition is an essential piece of political organizing. It stems from the basic fact of human life that we are not all the same. We do not have the same political motivations, or care about the same issues with equal weight. Some people are more motivated by social issues, others by economic issues. There is plenty of overlap, thanks to share core values of equality, justice, and empathy. But in a political system such as ours, we can’t do everything at once. Priorities have to be picked, and certain issues will come before others.

How that gets handled is essential to an effective political movement. If one part of the coalition gets everything and the other parts get nothing, then the coalition will break down as those who got nothing will get unhappy, restive, and will eventually leave. Good coalitions understand that everyone has to get their issue taken care of, their goals met – in one way or another – for the thing to hold together.

Conservatives understand this implicitly. The Wednesday meeting is essentially a coalition maintenance session, keeping together what could be a fractious and restive movement. Everyone knows they will get their turn. Why would someone who is primarily motivated by a desire to outlaw abortion support an oil company that wants to drill offshore? Because the anti-choicers know that in a few weeks, the rest of the coalition will unite to defund Planned Parenthood. And a few weeks after that, everyone will come together to appease Wall Street and the billionaires by fighting Elizabeth Warren. And then they’ll all appease the US Chamber by fighting to break a union.

There are underlying values that knit all those things together, common threads that make the communications coherent. But those policies get advanced because their advocates work together to sell the narrative.

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is primarily a fiscal conservative. So why would he attack domestic partner benefits? New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is not an anti-science zealot. So why would he refuse to say if he believes in evolution or creationism? Former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger supported marriage equality and refused to defend Prop 8 in court. So why did he twice veto a bill passed by the state legislature to veto marriage equality?

The answer to the above is simple: because they knew the importance of keeping the coalition together. They know that each part has to be looked after, or else the thing will fall apart as different constituencies turn on the person who failed to advance their agenda.

Members of the conservative coalition do not expect to get everything all at once. An anti-choice advocate would love to overturn Roe v. Wade tomorrow. But they don’t get angry when that doesn’t happen in a given year. Not because they are self-disciplined and patient, but because they get important victories year after year that move toward that goal. One year it could be a partial-birth abortion ban. The next year it could be defunding of Planned Parenthood. The year after that it could be a ban on any kind of federal funding of abortions, even indirect. (And in 2011, they’re getting some of these at the same time.)

More importantly, they know that even if their issue doesn’t get advanced in a given year, they also know that the other members of the coalition will not allow them to lose ground. If there’s no way to further restrain abortion rights (Dems control Congress, the voters repeal an insane law like South Dakota’s attempt to ban abortion), fine, the conservative coalition will at least fight to ensure that ground isn’t lost. They’ll unite to fight efforts to rescind a partial-birth abortion ban, or add new funding to Planned Parenthood. Those efforts to prevent losses are just as important to holding the coalition together as are the efforts to achieve policy gains.

Being in the conservative coalition means never having to lose a policy fight – or if you do lose, it won’t be because your allies abandoned you.

This is where the real contrast with the progressive and Democratic coalitions lies. Within the Democratic Party, for example, members of the coalition are constantly told it would be politically reckless to advance their goals, or that they have to give up ground previously won. The implicit message to that member of the coalition is that they don’t matter as much, that their goals or values are less important. That’s a recipe for a weak and ineffectual coalition.

There are lots of examples to illustrate the point. If someone is primarily motivated to become politically active because they oppose war, then telling them to support bombing of Libya in order to be part of the coalition is never, ever going to work. If someone was outraged by torture policies under President Bush, you’ll never get them to believe that torture is OK when President Obama orders it. If someone is motivated by taking action on climate change, then Democrats should probably pass a climate bill instead of abandoning it and instead promoting coal and oil drilling. If someone supports universal health care and wants insurance companies out of the picture, you need to at least give them something (like a public option) if you’re going to otherwise mandate Americans buy private insurance.

The LGBT rights movement offered an excellent example of this. For his first two years in office, not only did President Obama drag his feet on advancing LGBT rights goals, he actively began handing them losses, such as discharging LGBT soldiers under the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy or having his Justice Department file briefs in support of the Defense of Marriage Act. Obama argued that he could not advance the policy goals of DADT or DOMA repeal, but even if that were true, he was breaking up his coalition by also handing the LGBT rights movement losses on things like discharges and defending DOMA. It was only when LGBT organizations, activists, and donors threatened to leave the Obama coalition that the White House finally took action to end DADT.

A good coalition recognizes that not everyone is there for the same reason. The “Obama wars” online tend to happen because its participants do not recognize this fact. For a lot of progressives and even a lot of Democrats, re-electing President Obama is not the reason they are in politics. And if Obama has been handing them losses, then appealing to them on the basis of “Obama’s doing the best he can” or “the GOP won’t let him go further” is an argument that they’ll find insulting. This works in reverse. If someone believes that Obama is a good leader, or that even if he isn’t perfect he’s better than any alternative (especially a Republican alternative) then they won’t react well to a criticism of Obama for not attending to this or that progressive policy matter.

Cornel West has basically argued that he is leaving the Obama coalition because Obama turned his back on West’s agenda. That’s a legitimate reaction, whether you agree or not with the words West used to describe what happened. Cornel West won’t sway someone whose primarily political motivation is to defend Obama if he calls Obama a “black mascot” and an Obama defender won’t sway Cornel West if they’re telling West that he’s wrong to expect Obama to deliver on his agenda.

The bigger problem is that it is very difficult to successfully maintain a coalition in today’s Democratic Party. Michael Gerson has identified something I have been arguing for some time – that the Democratic Party is actually two parties artificially melded together. I wrote about this in the California context last fall – today’s Democratic Party has two wings to it. One wing is progressive, anti-corporate, and distrusts the free market. The other wing is neoliberal, pro-corporate, and trusts the free market.

These two wings have antithetical views on many, many things. Neoliberals believe that privatization of public schools is a good idea. Progressives vow to fight that with every bone in their body. Neoliberals believe that less regulation means a healthier economy. Progressives believe that we are in a severe recession right now precisely because of less regulation. Neoliberals believe that corporate power is just fine, progressives see it as a threat to democracy.

The only reason these two antithetical groups share a political party is because the Republicans won’t have either one. The neoliberals tend to be socially liberal – they support civil unions or outright marriage equality, don’t hate immigrants, and know that we share a common ancestor with the chimps. 35 years ago they might have still had a place in the Republican Party, but in the post-Reagan era, they don’t. So they came over to the Democrats, who after 1980 were happy to have as many votes as possible – and whose leaders were uneasy at the growing ranks of dirty hippies among the party base.

As to those progressives, destroying their values and institutions is the reason today’s GOP exists, so they clearly can’t go to that party. They don’t have the money to completely dominate the Democratic Party. Neither do they have the money to start their own political party, and right now they don’t want to, given the widespread belief that Ralph Nader cost Al Gore the 2000 election and led to the Bush disaster.

To our north, the neoliberals and progressives do have their own parties. The Canadian election earlier this month gave Conservatives a majority, but it also gave a historic boost to the New Democratic Party, home of Canada’s progressives, while the Liberal Party, home of Canada’s neoliberals, lost half their seats. Those parties have an easier time holding together their coalitions, and that enabled the NDP to break through and become the party that is poised to take power at the next election once Canadians react against Stephen Harper’s extremist agenda.

Still, for a variety of structural, financial, and practical reasons most American progressives are not yet ready to go down the path of starting their own party. And that makes mastery of coalition politics even more important.

Cornel West needlessly personalized things. He would have been on stronger ground had he pointed out, correctly, that Obama has not done a good job of coalition politics. Progressives have not only failed to advance much of their agenda, but are increasingly being told to accept rollbacks, which as we’ve seen doesn’t happen on the other side and is key to holding conservatism together as an effective political force. Obama told unions to accept a tax increase on their health benefits, and promptly lost his filibuster-proof majority in the US Senate in the Massachusetts special election. While Republicans are facing a big political backlash for actually turning on members of their coalition – for the first time in a long time – by proposing to end Medicare, Obama risks alienating more of his coalition by promoting further austerity. Civil libertarians have seen loss after loss under Obama (which explains clearly why Glenn Greenwald does not feel any need to defend Obama). Obama has consistently sided with the banks and has done nothing to help homeowners facing foreclosure. Hardly anybody has been prosecuted for the crimes and fraud at the heart of Wall Street during the 2000s boom.

There’s no doubt that any Democratic president faces a difficult task in holding together a political coalition made up of two groups – progressives and neoliberals – who distrust each other and are in many ways fighting each other over the basic economic issues facing this country. But Obama has not made much effort to keep progressives on his side. He halfheartedly advocated for their goals, did some things to roll back progressive gains and values, and expects progressives to remain in the coalition largely out of fear of a Republican presidency. That’s a legitimate reason to stay, don’t get me wrong. But it won’t work for everybody, and nobody should be surprised when some progressives walk. Everyone has their limit.

It has been clear that Obama is of the neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party. He always was (and so too was Hillary Clinton). It’s far easier for a neoliberal Democrat to win over just enough progressives to gain the party presidential nomination than vice-versa. Progressives are debating amongst themselves whether it makes sense to stay in that coalition if the terms are, as they have been since the late 1970s, subservience to a neoliberal agenda. I do not expect that debate to end anytime soon.

What we can do – and what we must do – is ensure that within the progressive coalition, we DO practice good coalitional behavior. If we are going to stay inside the Democratic Party, then we have to overcome the neoliberal wing. To do that, we have to be a disciplined and effective coalition. And to do that, we have to have each other’s back. We have to attend to each other’s needs. We have to recognize that everyone who wants to be in the coalition has a legitimate reason to be here, and has legitimate policy goals. If we have different goals – if Person A cares most about ending the death penalty, if Person B cares most about reducing carbon emissions, and if Person C cares most about single-payer health care, we have to make sure everyone not only gets their turn, but also make sure that each does not have to suffer a loss at our hands. If we find that we have goals that are in conflict, then we have to resolve that somehow.

One thing is clear: no coalition has ever succeeded with one part telling the other that their values are flawed, that they are wrong to want what they want, that they are wrong to be upset when they don’t get something. We are not going to change people’s values, and we should not make doing so the price of admission to a coalition. Unless we want to. In which case we have to accept the political consequences. I’d be happy to say we will never, and must never, coalition with neoliberals. But that has political consequences that many other progressives find unacceptable.

If we are going to address the severe crisis that is engulfing our country, we need to become better at building and maintaining coalitions. That means we have to decide who we want in the coalition, how we will satisfy their needs, and what price to maintain the coalition is too high to pay. Those are necessary, even essential political practices. It’s time we did that, rather than beating each other over the head for not seeing things exactly the way we do ourselves.

Only then will be become the disciplined and effective operation that we want.

The professors do their legal work through the Christian Right group, Liberty Counsel, which represents Miller.  Liberty Counsel denies that it was involved in the kidnapping.

According to Liberty law students,

“…in the required Foundations of Law class in the fall of 2008, taught by [alleged kidnapper] Miller’s attorneys Mat Staver and Rena Lindevaldsen, they were repeatedly instructed that when faced with a conflict between “God’s law” and “man’s law,” they should resolve that conflict through “civil disobedience.”  One student said, “the idea was when you are confronted with a particular situation, for instance, if you have a court order against you that is in violation of what you see as God’s law, essentially… civil disobedience was the answer.”

“Students who wrote that Miller should comply with court orders received bad grades,” Posner reports, “while those who wrote she should engage in civil disobedience received an A” according to three students in the class. They felt they were being taught to “disobey the law.”

A Tennessee pastor, Posner reports, has been charged

“with helping Lisa Miller, an “ex”-lesbian, abscond to Nicaragua with her young daughter Isabella after she flouted a series of court orders requiring Isabella’s visitation with Miller’s former partner, Janet Jenkins. According to the criminal complaint and FBI affidavit, Miller has been in hiding with Isabella since September 2009, living in the beach house of Christian Right activist and businessman Philip Zodhiates, whose daughter Victoria Hyden works as an administrative assistant at Liberty Law School.”

The law school, founded in 2004, “upon the premise that there is an integral relationship between faith and reason, and that both have their origin in the Triune God,” claims a vision “to see again all meaningful dialogue over law include the role of faith and the perspective of a Christian worldview as the framework most conducive to the pursuit of truth and justice.” The law school received accreditation from the America Bar Association last year.

The Foundations class is unlike anything offered at secular law schools, its purpose being to guide students toward a “Christian worldview” of the law. In the 2008-09 academic year, the required texts included David Barton’s Original Intent, which Barton’s website describes as “essential resource for anyone interested in our nation’s religious heritage and the Founders’ intended role for the American judicial system,” and Francis Schaeffer’s Christian Manifesto.  

The distinct combination of Schaeffer’s notions of Christian resistance to the secular state, with Barton’s Christian nationalist view of history, certainly places the class in an unambiguous theocratic framework.  And while it is unclear at this writing how successful Liberty Law will be in molding a generation of revolutionary theocratic attorneys, it is worth considering that the school was accredited by the American Bar Association last year.  It is also worth considering that current Virginia Governor (and former state Attorney General) Bob McDowell is a graduate of Regent University Law School, founded by theocratic televangelist and political operative, Pat Robertson.  Regent Law faced some similar controversy about the content of its early courses, when founding Dean Herb Titus taught R.J. Rushdoony’s Institutes of Biblical Law alongside conventional law school texts.

This history not withstanding, there is an ongoing tendency among some who ought to know better to pooh-pooh the influence and capacities of active theocratic elements operating in modern America.  And the case at hand suggests that the institutional legacies of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson may have a profound impact on society long after the time when people even remember their names.  It also suggests that that future may not be pre-ordained, when we consider that the FBI is investigating the possible role of part of Falwell’s legacy in a federal kidnapping case.

[Crossposted from Talk to Action]

Writing at The Huffington Post, Campolo recently wrapped a distinctly theocratic idea in the language of apparent moderation and called it a compromise.

Let’s unwrap it and see what’s inside.

Campolo first offers a series of false premises:

President Bush once said that marriage is a sacred institution and should be reserved for the union of one man and one woman. If this is the case — and most Americans would agree with him on this — then I have to ask: Why is the government at all involved in marrying people? If marriage really is a sacred institution, then why is the government controlling it, especially in a nation that affirms separation of church and state?

Campolo suggests that because George W. Bush once said something, we should therefore treat it as true. And if we accept Bush’s truth, we should feel right about it because a popular majority is said to agree with him. Of course, just because a politician expresses a view on the sacred, that does not mean the view is either sacred or true. And we are left to wonder what strange thinking has gotten a hold of Campolo who identifies himself as both a Democrat and a liberal. (We find out all too soon.)

Quite independently, liberal columnist Leonard Pitts recently wrote about the meaning of polls showing that a majority of Americans now support same sex marriage. (What are we to make of the views of Bush and Campolo now? Is their notion of traditional marriage no longer sacred because a majority favors same sex marriage?) While Pitts is pleased with the progress, he averred:

“In extolling the fact that the majority now approves same sex marriage, do we not also tacitly accept the notion that the majority has the right to judge?”

Here in Massachusetts where the right of same sex couples to marry was first recognized by the state Supreme Judicial Court in 2003, the overwhelming majority of citizens opposed same sex marriage at the time. Now, the overwhelming majority supports it. What’s more major religious communities such as Unitarian Universalism and Reform Judaism before the decision, and the United Church of Christ — the largest protestant denomination in the Bay State — since the decision, view same sex marriage as sacred as heterosexual marriage. Majority or minority view — shall Campolo and Bush’s sense of the sacred trump what is sacred to such historic religious communities as these? Or should each religious organization be able to decide this for itself?

Pitts continued:

One shudders to think what sort of nation this would be if Lyndon Johnson, before signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the Voting Rights Act of 1965, had first taken a poll of the American people.

We tend to regard America, proudly, as a nation where human rights are given. But that stance is actually at odds with the formulation famously propounded by one of the first Americans. Thomas Jefferson, who, after all, wrote that human rights are “unalienable” and that we are endowed with them from birth.

If you believe that, then you cannot buy into this notion of a nation where rights are magnanimously doled out to the minority on a timetable of the majority’s choosing. You and I cannot “give” rights. We can only acknowledge, respect and defend the rights human beings are born with.

Campolo continues:

Personally, as a Baptist minister, I always feel a bit uneasy at the end of the weddings that I perform when I have to say, “And now, by the authority given unto me by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, I pronounce you husband and wife.” Having performed a variety of religious exercises, such as reading scripture, saying prayers, giving a biblically-based homily and pronouncing blessings on the marriage, why am I required to suddenly shift to being an agent of the state? Doesn’t it seem inconsistent that during such a highly religious ceremony, I should have to turn the church into a place where government business is conducted? Isn’t it a conflict for me to unify my pastoral role with that of an agent of the state?

This is a strawman argument in the form of a rhetorical question. Campolo is not required to serve as an agent of the state. Nor is he required to merge his religious ceremonial duties with legal officiating. That is his choice. But he nevertheless has a solution for the problem that does not exist.

I propose that the government should get out of the business of marrying people and, instead, only give legal status to civil unions. The government should do this for both gay couples and straight couples, and leave marriage in the hands of the church and other religious entities. That’s the way it works in Holland. If a couple wants to be united in the eyes of the law, whether gay or straight, the couple goes down to the city hall and legally registers, securing all the rights and privileges a couple has under Dutch law. Then, if the couple wants the relationship blessed — to be married — they goes to a church, synagogue or other house of worship. Marriage should be viewed as an institution ordained by God and should be out of the control of the state.

But of course, this is the way it is in America as well — except we call it marriage whether one gets married by a clergyperson or by the Justice of the Peace. There is no reason why people can’t have a religious service if they want one and legal process before a Justice of the Peace or other designated official. (Unless, as in most states, said people happen to be gay.)

Back at the beginning of his essay, Campolo asked a rhetorical question that now bears answering.

If marriage really is a sacred institution, then why is the government controlling it, especially in a nation that affirms separation of church and state?

Campolo’s demagogic, tea-partyesque appeal to the idea that “government” is somehow “controlling” a “sacred institution” is reckless and wrong. State governments, representing all of the people, and not merely sectarian interests, have always issued marriage licenses. Marriage is “sacred” only to the extent that people within the marriage and the community to which they belong consider it to be so. No religious institution or coalition of the theocratic gets to define the sacred for the rest of the citizens and make it part of the legal code.

The way we define the sacred in America is as a right of individual conscience that is protected by our constitutional doctrine of separation of church and state. We have the right to marry whom we choose in whatever ceremony we choose from any institution that will have us, or no institution at all. No institution is required to preside over weddings, gay or strait, and I have heard no one argue that they should be required to do so. Really. All that is required is for those who are marring each other, to get a marriage license. Extending this right to gay people is consistent with our national ethos and constitutional framework of the rights of conscience free from undue influence from the government or powerful religious institutions.

If Campolo is uncomfortable functioning as a legal officiator and signer marriage licenses — all he has to do is tell people that is not his department and send them to the Justice of the Peace.

Campolo continues:

Of course, homosexual couples could go to churches that welcome and affirm gay marriages and get their unions blessed there. Isn’t that the way it should be in a nation that guarantees people the right to promote religion according to their personal convictions?

If such a proposal became normative, those like myself who hold to traditional beliefs about marriage would go to traditional churches where conservative beliefs about marriage are upheld, and we would have our marriages blessed there.

Of course, people can already attend the church of their choice and Campolo’s proposal does nothing to change that. But all this a a prelude to the theocratic idea behind his supposed compromise which he expresses with a remarkable spirit of bigotry against non-religious people.

And secularists who are unlikely to do anything that smacks of religion would probably just throw a party to celebrate a new union. Marriage would be preserved as a religious institution for all of us who want to view it as such, and nobody’s personal convictions about this highly charged issue would have to be compromised.

Listen to Campolo as he sneers about what “secularists” would “probably” do. As if commitment ceremonies by non-religious people are inherently meaningless and lack any form of reverence or solemnity; or as if expressions of exuberance and joy cannot be part of a marriage or commitment event. And good grief — as if people who get married in religious ceremonies don’t also sometimes party — and sometimes mighty hard. Campolo’s bigotry and sanctimony may be less obnoxious than Falwell’s and his participation in the campaign to tear down the wall of separation between church and state less obvious, but we should not mistake any of this for moderation or compromise.

Another key phrase, in which he rephrases the theme of his proposal is this:

Marriage would be preserved as a religious institution for all of us who want to view it as such…

Here he suggests that something about marriage is being changed when it is not. Marriage has always been a civil institution in America. It has always been a religious institution as well, for those who are religious. But these aspects of the institution of marriage are as separate as church and state should be. The law does not require religious blessing to be legal, and marriage in a particular religious institution does not require legal sanction to take place — but at some point a marriage license needs to be obtained from the state. It ain’t rocket science. Those who want their marriage to have a religious dimension can do so. Those who don’t, don’t.

But what is important to underscore about The Campolo Compromise is that it is not really about gay marriage. It is a fundamental reframing of the entire argument into a theocratic stalking horse against the rights of non-religious citizens.

Campolo proposes a two-tiered system: For religious people, commitment ceremonies will be called marriage; for everyone else, something else. As insulting and politically tone deaf as this is, it is also unlikely to pass constitutional muster. Here is what happened when traditionalist pols proposed that the Massachusetts high court consider a compromise. The State Senate asked the state’s highest court whether civil unions would be an adequate way to address the matter of same sex marriage. The court said no.

“…the Supreme Judicial Court advised on February 4, 2004, that “civil unions” would not suffice to satisfy the Court’s finding in Goodridge. The 4 justices who formed the majority in the Goodridge decision wrote: “The dissimilitude between the terms ‘civil marriage’ and ‘civil union’ is not innocuous; it is a considered choice of language that reflects a demonstrable assigning of same-sex, largely homosexual, couples to second-class status.” They continued: “For no rational reason the marriage laws of the Commonwealth discriminate against a defined class; no amount of tinkering with language will eradicate that stain.”

Indeed.

[Crossposted from Talk to Action]