Enough with Religious Exemptions Already
In the New York Times today, David Blankenhorn and Jonathan Roach propose a “compromise” on gay marriage:
Congress would bestow the status of federal civil unions on same-sex marriages and civil unions granted at the state level, thereby conferring upon them most or all of the federal benefits and rights of marriage. But there would be a condition: Washington would recognize only those unions licensed in states with robust religious-conscience exceptions, which provide that religious organizations need not recognize same-sex unions against their will.
No, sorry, that’s ridiculous. What is this “religious conscience”? As if any other kind of conscience is not as important? I say no more breaks for religious people. You want to have an opinion? You state it, and you fight for it, and you back it up with solid reasoning—but the laws will have to apply to you just the same as they apply to everybody else. Tax laws, conscription laws, marriage laws, everything. If we’re going to have exemptions for people who cannot in good conscience follow the laws of the land, then the only people who receive those exemptions should be the ones who can articulate reasonable grounds for their conscientious objection. And that should be an extremely high standard.
If you want to live in a society but following the same laws that apply to everyone else will so aggrieve you that you simply must be exempted from those laws, then one of three things must be true: (1) you have serious mental health problems; (2) a society ruled by law is impossible unless everyone agrees on everything; or (3) the laws are unjust and unfair and shouldn’t apply to anyone. If the first one is true, then you should exit from the public discourse and visit a mental health professional. If the second one is true, then let’s just stop talking about laws and admit that what we call “civil society” is really just an all-out, perpetual ideological war. If the third one is true, then let’s use our political processes to change the laws.
The better solution to the gay marriage issue is just to remove marriage from the domain of the government. Stop doling out legal benefits to people who qualify to carry the label of “married,” and let private citizens enter their own private domestic arrangements as they please. Enforce them like any other contractual arrangement. You don’t like the way other people arrange their private affairs? Too damn bad. You want to offer certain benefits to your employees’ significant others? Then either let your employees define who those significant others are on their own terms, or don’t offer those benefits. Simple. Easy. Clean. Just another business transaction.
Stop trying to push people around into your little model of the ideal domestic situation by employing the power and the money of the government to act as a carrot and a stick. Right now I’m sitting at my desk in my home office. There’s a window in front of me. I can see the two houses across the street. What’s happening in there? Are they having consensual sex with their siblings? Swing parties? Are they allowing their children to watch pornographic movies or play violent video games? I don’t know, I don’t care, and I cannot, for the life of me, imagine how any consensual arrangements, conduct, or transactions occurring in my neighbors’ homes has any adverse effect on anything that matters to me in my life—or why it should matter to me at all.
That vast swaths of our population, if seated in my position, would make themselves ill with worry over how their neighbors arrange their affairs would be comic and hilarious were it not for their dogged persistence in transforming that unhealthy obsession with the lives of others into political action and the force of law. We don’t need a “compromise” with those people; we need those people to grow up, live their own lives, and help us create a public discourse on the issues that really matter.