BIGOTRY AND THE GAY MARRIAGE QUESTION

As a heterosexual male, I naturally wonder sometimes why the issue of same-sex marriage pushes such intense buttons within me. I know that I am concerned about justice (both in the sense of giving each their due and in the concerns over procedural justice I share with Habermas and Rawls, and the distributive justice I derivatively identify with the Marxist tradition), but that alone doesn't explain it. I get passionate about a good many issues of justice, but none so much as this. Perhaps I even get angrier about it than some of my gay friends, but I think that's more due to my confrontational nature and fundamental immaturity than to our relative levels of concern.

But I think that, for me, the issue is irreducible to ethical systems of justice or political struggle, although both are vitally important components in winning an eventual victory in the fight. No, I think it's about love. I think the combination of being an incurable romantic and a dogmatic deliberative democrat (the idea, not the party) means that I will and have ended friendships, polemicized loudly, and felt my heart race over the gay marriage question. And the combination of understanding love and failing to understand why I would deny my responsibility for others compels me, insistently, to believe in allowing responsible moral agents to enter into mutually consented, and constructed, covenants.

Those who ask, seriously or ironically, why promoting same-sex marriage won't open the door to legal incest, interspecies marriage, child rape, and the like are not merely committing a slippery slope fallacy of the worst kind. Nor are they only guilty of a failure to consider the difference between agency and non-consent, or in the ability and inability to communicate that consent in the public forum. I can't marry a tree, and when we get to the point where I could, we'll talk again.

Instead, I believe those who make the slippery slope argument are cursed with an inability or unwillingness to extend fellow human agents basic moral consideration and are therefore resorting to ill-conceived and disingenuous arguments (after all, if the threshold is competent consent, none of their arguments are true) as a substitution for deliberative reasoning. And those who would deploy their religious principles on the unwilling for the purpose of defining that unwilling out of the scope of moral agency, are likewise cursed. That foundational insensitivity is not something any government, state, or collective can instantly eradicate, but when governments and other collective entities are presented with a choice between defining moral agents in or out of access to social goods, and when the choice to deny access is based on private, metaphysical beliefs rather than tangible state interest, we call such governments --and the people who support them-- bigots.

Already, those of us who've used that word in this debate have been chastised for it, and I'll concede that it's a powerful, damning term. It is, however, worth a second look, if only to contextualize the struggle for moral recognition and the arguments and images normally invoked against whatever differential traits separate the majority from the minority. Bigotry isn't just about the clearest or starkest differences among us. Most of those differences --race and ethnicity, gender, class, and even religion-- are as problematic to pin down as sexual orientation is. The scientific consensus is that race is largely a construct, and even gender is an unstable term in a world of contingent gender roles and bodies that don't fit the norm. Those who would balk at calling gay rights-deniers bigots should remember that whatever the antecedent causes of homosexuality, we routinely decry bigotry against Mormons, Catholics and Jews, and surely religion, if not religious heritage, is at least as much a choice as sexual orientation--and probably much more so.

While I am not making a positive argument for some kind of obligation to call gay rights-deniers bigots, I am unconvinced by any argument I've heard thus far against the use of the term. Some argue that it's inappropriate because the denial of same-sex marriage rights is a reasonable belief, whether ultimately defensible or not. Some concede that those who would actively persecute or shun homosexuals can reasonably be called bigots, but those who oppose same sex marriage don't necessarily support persecution or shunning. Although I understand the sentiment, its resultant argument is unpersuasive. For we (those in favor of such rights) would--and did--call those people bigots who opposed interracial marriage, whether or not said opponents believed in the racial superiority of whites. In fact, it is more reasonable to withhold the term bigot from someone who privately believes in racial superiority but publicly supports interracial marriage rights, because that person has exercised an important democratic obligation: They have refused to make their private metaphysical beliefs the basis of public policy.

Still others argue that calling people bigots will make them angry and hurt, and undermine the struggle for acceptance by alienating potential supporters. I suppose that it's a given that people will get angry if we call them bigots, and I suppose there's a possibility that some of those people would otherwise, eventually, come to their senses and allow consenting agents to enter into mutual agreements. But I don't think it hurt the civil rights struggle to call white racists bigots, and there's at least as much of a chance that such stark and honest language will provide all of us with a clarity unavailable in terms such as "heterosexist," or "advocate of traditional marriage." In a world where various rhetorical actors struggle for legitimacy, dominance, emancipation or repression, calling things as we see them can sometimes be both a cogent and self-consistent strategy.

It's a rather simple matter: If you believe, as I do, that there is, in a democracy based on procedural equality, no reason to deny people the ability to access state sanction and legal benefits for their mutually consentual relationships, then you also believe that the denial of such access is arbitrary and capricious, that it is based on a private and ultimately subjective belief that ought not be the basis of public policy. When, in the face of such a situation, some people continue to oppose that access because they feel that some people have an innately superior right to access than others, such beliefs can be called prejudicial, and thus their adherents can accurately be called bigots. Thus, there is a defensible argument for calling them bigots, although one needn't feel compelled to do so.

Coming soon: A review of The Economist's case for gay marriage.