Secularize

My final point about what can be done to advance the cause of same-sex marriage in the wake of Proposition 8’s passage is to note that that a lot of the animosity towards gay people comes from Biblical condemnation of homosexuality. It is not surprising that secular people, who do not necessarily take their moral cues from the Bible, are generally more accepting of gays than religious people. Now, by “religious,” I am generally referring here to Christian, Muslim, and the more conservative strains of Judaism. There certainly are some Christian and Jewish congregations that are very accepting of open gay people. And non-Western religions seem to be generally more accepting of gays. But the major western monotheistic religions condemn homosexuality in no uncertain terms.

After knowing a gay person personally, the second most powerful factor favoring support of SSM is irreligiosity. Without being exposed to the repetitious condemnation of homosexuality associated with religious instruction, people will have to figure out for themselves if this is something that they find morally blameworthy or not. And when you look at the matter free from the tentacles of religion, you tend to find nothing morally blameworthy in homosexuality.

So if you are not religiously observant, chances are much better that you support SSM. Now, people who are religious are going to stay that way. People who find value in going to church are not going to stop finding that value. Nor should they. Churches do a lot of good in their communities and even if a lot of the time and money invested in them is focused on talking to an imaginary friend in the sky, they do provide fellowship and a social network for their members. I can see why people would want that sort of thing, would be attracted to it.

But it’s an open, and unanswerable, question as to how many people who show up on Sunday (or Saturday, or Friday night) to services actually believe the things they say they believe. If you ask them, they will tell you that they do. I know from my own experience as a very young man that the pressure to say you believe can be overwhelming. I risk running down a rabbit hole of permutations here, so I’m going to skip an explication of support in this paragraph and leave it at this: there are a lot of people who aren’t really believers, and who would be secular if they thought they could do so without paying a heavy social price for it.

If we want to help SSM become a reality, those secular people need to be encouraged to “come out” just like gay people do. It needs to be socially okay for people to say, “I’m not religious.” While they may not go to church anymore because of that, they need to be able to keep their careers and still have friends and contacts — and to be accepted as moral, worthwhile people to know.

If a person’s religiosity becomes simply another neutral sort of facet about a person — if going to church, or not, becomes like rooting for a particular sports team or drinking alcohol or collecting stamps — then lots of good things will happen. First, people will be freer to make up their own minds about issues of spirituality and morality. Second, people will shed some of their moral condemnation of things that are only condemned because the Bible says so as opposed to more inherent and objective qualities. There’s more benefits that I think would be realized, but I want to focus on the issue of same-sex marriage here.

Point is, you don’t have to be religious to understand that murder and theft are morally contemptible. But you kind of do have to be religious to believe that gay sex is morally contemptible. Objectively, it’s just plain not any more or less morally weighty than any other sex act.

On a related note, we need to make more clear the distinction between church and government. What the church does is different than what the government does. This is blurry in the case of marriage, because both purport to marry people. As a society, we’ve been quite comfortable with the idea of a distinction been a marriage recognized by a church but not the government, or vice versa, for some time now. The Roman Catholic Church will not recognize my marriage, because The Wife is divorced (I am her second husband). But the state does recognize it. No one seems to have any problem with that. I sure don’t, seeing as I quit being Catholic years before I ever met The Wife, so I don’t give a damn what the RCC thinks.

There is no particular reason why SSM cannot be treated the same way, it’s just that two guys being together is still much more shocking than someone getting divorced and re-married. The more we get away from churches being the sole dispensers of standards of morality and normality, the less shocking such things will become and the more accepting people will be of others who have built their lives differently than themselves.

A more secular society — even one that is marginally more secular than things are now — will be much more willing to accept the idea of same sex marriage. This is one of many reasons why secularists and gays should make common cause.