THE TIES THAT DIVIDE: Transcript of a Pew Forum debate between Gerard Bradley and Andrew Sullivan

Excerpts:

AS: People tend to think that homosexuals are born under a Guthrie bush somewhere near Castro Street in San Francisco. They pop up out of the womb already in a leather harness on the back of a motorbike, or pop out of the womb with an absolutely unerring sense of what drapes will go with which wallpaper. But the reality, of course, is that gay people are born everywhere. It's a remarkable fact of this minority that it is absolutely endemic to the society and, in fact, endemic to every society that has ever existed. Gay people come from and live in and grow up in heterosexual families. Unlike any other minority, they are absolutely integrated into the broader society from the minute that they are born.

The notion that these people should leave their homes at a certain point to go out into the broader world and then find that their parents have actually changed the locks and thrown away the keys, and when they want to come back into their own families as fully-fledged members of those families, as married couples, they're denied entrance back in. To tear families apart in this way, to tell one sibling among many that they cannot have the same ritual, the same process of integration into their own family, is a terribly destructive element in the stability and maturity and love that every family, I believe, should uphold.

It's also, alongside many other traditionally conservative arguments, an argument for integration, not for Balkanization. I'm one of those people who don't believe that human beings should be cordoned off into certain categories by their identity, whether it be black or female or Latino or Jewish or gay or any of the other appellations that we have managed to bring to this complicated debate about identity. I think, in general, that so far as we possibly can, we should treat people as individuals, regardless of their attributes, regardless of their identities, and that our entire political system traditionally has insisted upon treating people as individuals before we treat them as gay people. ...

The point is also that this is not some tiny fringe of exceptions. If you look at married households in the United States, you will find a majority of married households, a small majority, are households without children. Also, a quarter of same-sex couples already have children. It seems to me that the procreation argument falls apart legally as soon as you recognize it is not a criterion for civil marriage upheld for heterosexuals. It fails socially and culturally because in our culture at this time, procreation is not understood to be an essential part of what it is to be married.

GB: ...But I believe that none of these rules for conversation in the public square, none of these norms about theological argument, have any traction on the debate about same-sex marriage. It seems to me again that in the course of the public argument over same-sex marriage, defenders of traditional marriage are not relying upon what might be called strictly religious sources or entirely religious reasons, just to illustrate a little bit more, or explain by way of illustration. ...

Now, at the root of the movement to legally recognize same-sex marriage is not religion but rather culture. More specifically, the argument that I take most seriously is the argument posed by Andrew Sullivan in his remarks today. It's an argument that anybody defending traditional marriage has to reckon with. It's an argument from culture and it's an argument from law, but the argument goes something like this: given what marriage has already become in our law, what it already is in our law, and how it is lived, how marriage is lived, inhabited, carried out, by a very large number of married couples in our society, it is unfair to exclude same-sex partners from that legal status.

This argument builds not upon religion or even upon some peculiarly gay ideology, but rather begins with what you might call the straight world's rebellion against marriage. That's a rebellion that began probably in the mid-1960s and continues to the present day. People look at the way many married couples act and seem to think about their marriages, and people look at what many homosexual partners can do and may think about their relationships. You see that many married men and women think of their relationships mainly as an emotional, financial and sexual partnership involving the mutual conferral of important individual benefits. Proponents of same-sex marriage say that homosexuals and lesbians are quite capable and have demonstrated their capability of entering into such relationships. Such proponents of same-sex marriage conclude that opposition to same-sex marriage is an arbitrary exclusion of persons from the straight marriage club.

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posted by Eve at 4:34 PM VOTE

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