With Ted Olsen and David Boises joining the legal team challenging Virginia's ban on legal recognition of same sex unions, be they given the title of marriage or civil union, it is more or less guaranteed that Virginia will be receiving far more attention from the national media. Likewise, there will be more discussion of the merits - if any other than satiating anti-gay animus - for the ban in the first place. As noted in a post earlier in the week, Ken Cuccinelli's brief against the plaintiffs' suit in Bostic, et al (i) covered no new ground and merely regurgitated losing arguments that failed in other lawsuits around the country and (ii) bizarrely traced the marriage ban back to the Church of England's Book of Common Prayer and Elizabethan era statutes. Today's Richmond Times Dispatch has a column that takes the exact opposite approach from Cuccinelli and lays out a conservative argument in support of gay marriage. Here are column excerpts:
Most everyone also knows the conservative argument against gay marriage: God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. . . .
In 2010, [Ted Olson penned a piece for Newsweek explaining his version of “The Conservative Case for Gay Marriage.” He pointed out that “same-sex unions promote the values conservatives prize” — such as commitment, stable families, and “thinking beyond one’s own needs.” . . . . Those are good reasons. But they are not the only reasons conservatives might accept gay marriage. Here are five more.
(1) Gay marriage is good for “the institution of marriage.”
If you think marriage is a valuable cultural institution, and you worry about its decline in contemporary America, then you should welcome a reform that would shore up that institution against erosion. Just as the institution of banking is stronger with many participants rather than few, having more marriages rather than fewer is better for the institution of marriage.
(2) Gay marriage fosters virtue.
Social conservatives believe sexual promiscuity is bad for the body and corrosive to the soul — that the sexual revolution’s encouragement of licentiousness has degraded social norms and debased our common virtue. If they are right about that, then allowing homosexuals to enter lifetime monogamy ought to be altogether desirable — just as it is desirable for heterosexuals, and for the same reasons.
(3) Gay marriage benefits children.
In his 2012 book “A Fundamental Freedom: Why Republicans, Conservatives, and Libertarians Should Support Gay Rights,” David Lampo notes that “over a quarter of a million children are living with same-sex couples.” Forbidding those couples to marry does not spirit their children away from them into the arms of straight couples (which likely would be awful for those children anyway). All it does, as the ACLU points out, is deny those children “the protection and stability of having parents who are married.”
(4) Banning gay marriage injects government where it doesn’t belong.
Conservatives probably will respond to the previous point by contending that while letting single-gender couples raise children might not be profoundly harmful, it certainly is not optimal. The optimal family, they will say, consists of children raised by two parents of the opposite sex.
Let’s accept this as true for argument’s sake. But while it is one thing to stipulate what might be optimal, it is something else — something far more dangerous — to suggest the state should impose its view of what is optimal on the nation’s families.
(5) Banning gay marriage encourages big-government thinking.
Conservatives contend they want to protect the institution of marriage and foster procreation by straight couples. First question: Show me where the Constitution says that is any part of government’s job. Go ahead, I’ll wait. Can’t find it, can you? Even if someone could, the means chosen — banning gay marriage — is connected to those goals only by logic so thin and weak it cannot stand up. Letting gay people marry does not discourage straight people from getting married, and it certainly does not discourage them from procreating. . . . . By pretending it does, conservatives adopt precisely the sort of big-government thinking they otherwise abhor.
Finally, conservatives say the traditional straight family is — well, traditional. But as another court has noted, this does not explain the reason for discriminating against gays, it merely repeats it. Repeating a conclusion doesn’t prove it. And besides: “Upholding tradition” doesn’t appear anywhere in the Constitution, either.
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