The religious arguments made by opponents to this are disingenuous.
The Bible and many other traditional religious texts have lots of bad things to say about, say, usury (the charging of interest, or at least excess interest), yet you see nobody protesting outside credit card companies or payday lenders. I don't think I've ever heard a Christian conservative criticize our excessive level of private debt. The Catholic Church today is generally anti-death-penalty and anti-war, yet these Papal opinions do not seem to trickle down to the laity either. Christian conservatives were mostly cheerleading the Iraq invasion, though protestants did so slightly more than Catholics.
That tells me this is a proxy debate, at least for the right, and that the real issue is something else. Proxy debates happen when the real issue being debated is something that is verboten in polite discussion, or is something that's already been put to bed -- e.g. the "evolution" proxy debate which is really over teaching of religion in schools (an already settled issue).
The real reason as near as I can tell boils down to crypto-racism and eugenics concerns. If homosexuality is "okay," then that might negatively impact fertility among more "desirable" urban demographics, etc. Basically the concern is that this will negatively impact white or upper class fertility.
That stuff is verboten to talk about in polite company, thus the proxy debating.
P.S. I don't agree and am pro-equality -- I am just analyzing what I see as the real reason for all the opposition. Delve into the right-o-sphere and you immediately run into a ton of "HBD" (human biodiversity, a modern neo-racialist rebranding) type stuff.
P.P.S. I did give the parents a compensatory up-vote since I don't think down-votes should be done out of disagreement. Down-votes should be for things that are just stupid, effortless, or mean-spirited, not for opinions that are just unpopular.
So, speaking as the thing that goes bump in the night (NRX, HBD, the works), I'd agree that your average anti-gay-marriage person is not reading Leviticus and pulling out political positions based on such. I'd even agree that it's a proxy debate.
But I don't think the real issue is crypto-racism. I mean, for one, I'm what you'd call a "racist" and I don't mention such to my anti-gay marriage family. I mean, hey, if racists and homophobes are all one big happy family, they'd know it, right? All I can say is that I'd advise you to take it in good faith when someone says they're against gay marriage and abhor racism. I'm not one of those people, but I used to be, and there are many of them.
(Another way you can tell: when conservatives parody protected classes by assigning as many statuses as they can think of, often they will come up with the black disabled lesbian with a liberal arts degree. But that would be an object of glee rather than outrage for the person you describe: the suicidal enemy. That conservatives don't like the BDL tells me that they don't really consider the homosexual part (or the degree!) a handicap. That's a victory, of a sort, for someone)
But I do think you're right that it's a proxy debate. I think it's an attempt to re-fight the sexual revolution, and gay marriage is seen as yet more lost ground on that front.
Was this a viable political strategy? Intuitively no, and empirically, definitely no. But voters gonna vote.
Thank you, quite insightful and I agree on all counts. My use of the Bible quote was an attempt to cherry-pick in the same sort of way as the arguments I'm detracting. The selective re-imagining of religious texts to fit the preexisting social and ethical desires of a group of people is probably an issue as old as religion and organized civilization itself.
I strongly suspect that the real historic reason for taboos against homosexuality boiled down to two concerns in roughly this order:
(1) Keeping birth rates up in order to raise armies and work forces. Agrarian civilizations derived power largely from their demographic vitality. There are actual references to this in the Bible if I recall correctly -- about your children being as arrows in a quiver, etc. Opting out of fertility was to those civilizations akin to draft dodging or not paying taxes.
(2) Somewhat legitimate sanitation and health concerns before the advent of antibiotics, condoms, etc. -- since some homosexual behaviors are higher risk in this regard. Keep in mind that what today would be a minor infection might be a death sentence back them.
#1 is obsolete. Industrial and post-industrial civilizations derive power from brains and infrastructure, not raw population.
#2 is obsolete if you have an educated population with access to condoms and health care.
If "dysgenics" ever becomes an actual problem we can just fix it with genetic engineering... which of course would require confronting both the left and the right. The left would oppose it because it's not "natural" (no GMO!), while the right would consider it "playing God."
The Bible and many other traditional religious texts have lots of bad things to say about, say, usury (the charging of interest, or at least excess interest), yet you see nobody protesting outside credit card companies or payday lenders. I don't think I've ever heard a Christian conservative criticize our excessive level of private debt. The Catholic Church today is generally anti-death-penalty and anti-war, yet these Papal opinions do not seem to trickle down to the laity either. Christian conservatives were mostly cheerleading the Iraq invasion, though protestants did so slightly more than Catholics.
That tells me this is a proxy debate, at least for the right, and that the real issue is something else. Proxy debates happen when the real issue being debated is something that is verboten in polite discussion, or is something that's already been put to bed -- e.g. the "evolution" proxy debate which is really over teaching of religion in schools (an already settled issue).
The real reason as near as I can tell boils down to crypto-racism and eugenics concerns. If homosexuality is "okay," then that might negatively impact fertility among more "desirable" urban demographics, etc. Basically the concern is that this will negatively impact white or upper class fertility.
That stuff is verboten to talk about in polite company, thus the proxy debating.
P.S. I don't agree and am pro-equality -- I am just analyzing what I see as the real reason for all the opposition. Delve into the right-o-sphere and you immediately run into a ton of "HBD" (human biodiversity, a modern neo-racialist rebranding) type stuff.
P.P.S. I did give the parents a compensatory up-vote since I don't think down-votes should be done out of disagreement. Down-votes should be for things that are just stupid, effortless, or mean-spirited, not for opinions that are just unpopular.