The Question: Should gay couples be allowed to marry?
Marriage is and always has been one of our most important institutions, arguably the key building block both for individual families and for society as a whole. In the United States, it is a rite that is both religious (sanctified by various churches) and civil (recognized and regulated by the government).
In recent years, gay couples and their allies have launched a movement to gain the right to marry. Marriage is a civil right, they argue, and the government’s denial of gay couples’ right to marry amounts to naked (and illegal) discrimination. A church might choose not to accept gay marriage, but the state has no right to do so, especially since marriage comes with hundreds of specific civil benefits – things like visitation rights in hospitals, the right for foreign-born spouses to obtain citizenship, the right to inherit property and Social Security benefits, and so on.
Opponents of gay marriage, meanwhile, argue that marriage is and always has been fundamentally defined as a union of one man and one woman, and thus homosexual relationships, by definition, can never be “marriages.” To redefine marriage to include gay relationships might undermine the institution itself, leading to a breakdown of traditional order and morality. In many cases, foes of gay marriage also cite specific religious teachings that define homosexuality as sinful and unacceptable.
Dive Deeper in Shmoop Civics:
- Equal Protection
- Same-Sex Marriage & the 14th Amendment
- The Road to Lawrence v. Texas
- The Gay Marriage Debate and the Due Process Clause
Why You Care:
If you’re gay, you care for the obvious reason: whether or not gay marriage gains legal recognition will powerfully affect the potential course of your life.
And if you’re not gay, gay marriage still matters because it’s become one of the most controversial social issues in modern America, taking on a significance larger than the relatively narrow question of whether or not your cousin Christopher and his partner James ought to be able to get a marriage license.
Gay marriage is such a hot button because it brings core American values into conflict with each other. Doesn’t respect for equal rights require the government to recognize gay marriages? But what about democracy? Majority votes in many states have indicated that the will of the people is that gay marriage should not be recognized. And what of freedom of religion? Should the government really force through social change that most faiths reject? On the other hand, what about the separation of church and state? Who cares what Leviticus says about homosexuality; why should that have any impact on secular law?
Depending on how you see things, then, the fight over gay marriage might be seen as the key civil rights struggle of our time. Or as the key battle in a long war to define the moral soul of the country. Or maybe both at the same time.
Gay marriage is a big deal today because it happens to be the place where two major social and political movements crashed – hard – into each other.
The first of those is the Christian Right. The majority of the American population has always been Christian, but recent decades have seen an explosion in the popularity of more fundamentalist evangelical churches. These conservative churches have also become much more politically active; traditionally hostile to politics – don’t “gain the whole world, and lose [your] soul” – these churches began organizing for political action in the 1970s, becoming the backbone of an increasingly conservative Republican Party in response to perceived excesses of liberalism in modern America. In the political sphere, the Christian Right has fought to ban abortion, clean up the coarsening and sexualization of popular culture, and oppose homosexuality.
Over the same period of time, we’ve also seen a huge surge in the gay rights movement. Until quite recently, discrimination against gays was widely accepted. The American Psychiatric Association considered homosexuality to be a form of mental illness until 1973, and many states had laws making gay sex a crime until the Supreme Court ruled that unconstitutional in 2003. Since the modern gay rights movement began in 1969 with rioting against a police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a Manhattan gay bar, America’s LGBT community has been working to gain legal equality and social acceptance. Recent public opinion polling has shown a fairly rapid and steady softening in popular hostility towards homosexuality.
In recent years, then, American society has grown both more religiously conservative and more accepting of gays and lesbians. Those two trends ran straight into each other in the debate over gay marriage, fueling a series of ballot measures and court cases in many different states. The most intense recent controversy has erupted in California, where the city of San Francisco began issuing marriage licenses to gay couples in 2004. In 2008, voters narrowly passed Proposition 8, banning gay marriage in the state. Then supporters of gay marriage sued to overturn Prop 8 as unconstitutional; in 2010, they won their case in federal district court. The case, Perry v. Schwarzenegger, is currently on appeal and likely will go all the way the United States Supreme Court.
Key Arguments – Pro-Gay Marriage:
- Equal Protection: The Constitution’s 14th Amendment guarantees “protection of the laws” to everybody. Being gay is not a choice; therefore, gay people are denied the equal protection of the law if they are denied the same right to marry the partner of their choice granted to straight couples.
- Separation of Church and State: Opposition to gay marriage is rooted overwhelmingly in religious teachings. The First Amendment of the Constitution establishes the principle of church and state; civil marriage law should not be determined by religious doctrine. The civil privileges of marriage are not dependent upon religion and should not be denied to gay people some religions object.
- Minority Rights: The core purpose of the Bill of Rights (and key later amendments like the 14th) is to protect vulnerable minorities from the tyranny of the majority. In America, majorities can’t strip minorities of their rights by simple popular vote.
- Benefits of Marriage: Civil marriage comes with all kinds of government benefits – more than 1000 of them from the federal government alone, according to one recent count. Denying gay couples access to those benefits is illegal discrimination. Marriage also provides more intangible benefits of community recognition and social stability; gay families ought to be able to enjoy these benefits just like straight families.
- No Harm: Recognition of a gay couple’s marriage does no real harm whatsoever to another straight couple’s marriage, or to society as a whole. Churches will still be free to make their own choices on whether or not to recognize gay marriage, even after the government begins recognizing gay civil marriages.
- Equality: Recognition of gay marriage is part of a larger recognition of gay people as normal and fully accepted members of American society, rather than “sexual deviants” or second-class citizens. To deny the equality of gay marriage is to deny the equality of gay people, period.
Key Arguments – Anti-Gay Marriage:
- Tradition: In the United States, marriage has always been defined as the union of one man and one union. That tradition, arguably the key institution of Western Civilization, is worthy of respect and should not be radically overturned.
- Democracy: Citizens in many states have voted on propositions concerning gay marriage, consistently supporting the definition of marriage as one man and one woman. Supporters of gay marriage seek to overturn the will of the people.
- Children: The ultimate purpose of marriage as a social institution is to create and raise children. For obvious biological reasons, gay marriages cannot produce children, and the adopted children of gay parents will inevitably miss out on the benefits of growing up with a father and mother in the home.
- Slippery Slope: If the definition of marriage changes today to recognize same-sex unions, why shouldn’t it change again tomorrow to recognize the union of one man and 43 women, or one man and his sister, or one man and his pet goat, or one man and an inanimate object? The line must be drawn somewhere.
- Religion: Most (but not all) major religious sects in America teach that homosexuality is a sin. The Bible contains several overt condemnations of homosexuality, for example in the book of Leviticus describing it as an abomination. Why should an abomination be recognized as marriage?
Viewpoints – Pro-Gay Marriage:
The Human Rights Campaign, America’s the largest gay rights advocacy organization, makes the case for gay marriage (pdf).
Freedom to Marry, a political organization devoted to making gay marriage legal, offers its supporters these guidelines for effective messaging on the issue (pdf).
Andrew Sullivan, a conservative opinion writer and gay activist (yep, you read that right), was one of the first to make the case for gay marriage, advocating its legalization back in the 1990s. In this piece, Sullivan describes his own 2008 marriage and makes the case that gay marriage is really just marriage, period.
In 2010, Judge Walker ruled that California’s Prop 8, which had banned gay marriages in the state, was unconstitutional. His reasoning (which is currently being appealed by gay marriage opponents) implicitly makes a strong legal case in favor of gay marriage.
Viewpoints – Anti-Gay Marriage:
The Family Research Council is a prominent conservative Christian political advocacy group. Here the FRC makes the case against gay marriage in secular terms, focusing on the importance of mothers and fathers to raising children.
The National Organization for Marriage, which has organized election campaigns against gay marriage in several states, provides messaging advice to its supporters.
Douthat, a conservative New York Times columnist, makes a secular argument in defense of “lifelong heterosexual monogamy as a unique and indispensible estate… still worth honoring, and still worth trying to preserve.”
This 2009 story from the conservative Weekly Standard magazine argues that gay marriage will undermine straight marriage, and thus society as a whole, by weakening crucial institutions of kinship in modern society.