GAY & STRAIGHT MARRIAGE - NOT THE SAME

Advocates for gay marriage have persuaded tens of millions of North Americans that gay marriage is the same as straight marriage. That uniformity now appears incontestable to our society, compelling law societies, educators, social ethicists, clergy and religious leaders and politicians to conclude that the institution of marriage is not compromised if gays are permitted to marry. In fact, the syllogism suggests that the definition of marriage must be expanded because gays deserve the right to marry. So the definition has been stretched. After all, there are no negative consequences for society, so the argument goes and this persuasion has prospered within a very short period of years.

 

The Canadian public mind maintains that gay marriage is as morally conventional as straight marriage, because of the insistence in newer legislation that allowing gays to marry is a fundamental right. Advocates have gone so far as to say in the United States at least, that denying gays this right is undistinguishable from the capricious iniquity of denying African Americans their civil rights. It could have happened but I myself haven't read or heard a similar comparison used in Canada, arguing that denying gays the right to marry is like denying indigenous people their civil rights.  

That argument in either instance is not useful because it doesn't work. During the 1960s civil rights marches, it was never argued that blacks are the same as whites. It wouldn't make sense to maintain that First Nations are the same as non-aboriginals. Such an argument would have disgraced the cause of rectifying a moral wrong. It was precisely because Blacks and Aboriginals were different that they pleaded for the recognition of what should be their citizenship entitlements. Blacks and Aboriginals won those rights not because they were just like whites but rather because their lives and cultures should be recognized as different from but equal to whites. It is precisely this recognition of difference that should have occurred in the same sex discussions. It wasn't. Advocates for gay rights have not used the 'we are different' card, but rather 'we're the same'. 

Gay romance and gay sex and gay marriage are not the same as heterosexual love and union. We are an imprudent people led by reckless thinkers in power, who have nationally conceded that gay couples are the same as straight couples in wanting monogamy, children, courtship, and fidelity.  It is lamentable that public debate and discussion of differences between gay and straight is now virtually banned within our Canadian society, and if not banned, then those who comment to differences are tagged as homophobic.  Yet every Canadian adult who privately compares gay and straight sex and relationship understands that 'difference' is unambiguous. The 'sameness' rhetoric is so counterintuitive that the best defense is to vilify the right to speak about it. That is what is happening. We won't talk about it. Okay, I'll stop talking about it.    

(stimulus for this post was garnered from Stephen H. Webb's superior 2014 article entitled 'Why Gay Rights are Not the New Civil Rights.')