Opposition has nothing to do with animus toward gays, but reverence for marriage.


The strongest temptation in politics is to assume evil motives of the opposition. Everyone is prone to it, and most of us are guilty of it at one time or another. Once you decide that the other side's real agenda isn't what they say it is, conspiracy theories become more plausible and every reasonable compromise seems like outrageous appeasement.

COLUMN: A modest proposal for polygamy

That was one reason the Supreme Court's oral arguments on same-sex marriage were so refreshing. There were no nasty or bigoted attacks on gays. There was no ad hominem disrespect for religious belief. Instead, there was a sincere effort to figure out how to do right by all the parties concerned, to the extent the court even can or should even try.


Many of my friends and colleagues on the right have taken to arguing that gay marriage is really just a battering ram in the left's long march to destroy religion itself. For instance, my friend John Nolte of Breitbart.com (who supports civil unions) argues that same-sex marriage is merely the vehicle for the news media's ultimate goal, the destruction of the church.

There's no denying that hostility to religion — traditional or otherwise — can be found among those supporting gay marriage. But the average supporter of same-sex marriage is probably not a modern day heir to Denis Diderot, the French Revolutionary who said, "Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest."

Similarly, not every opponent of same-sex marriage is driven by prejudice. Hence, Nolte's support for civil unions. There is a palpable odor of self-congratulation among many supporters of gay marriage as they cast themselves as paladins of tolerance and decency battling an undifferentiated mass of bigots.

Last February, a Washington Post reporter explained to the newspaper's ombudsman that gay rights are the "civil rights issue of our time," and that if conservative views and arguments on same-sex marriage get short shrift in the paper, well, so do the views of hard-boiled racists and other bigots. This was from an allegedly objective news reporter — and the ombudsman heartily concurred. Among openly liberal pundits and politicians, the myopic self-righteousness can be far worse.

Not about bigotry

Absolutely, there are many on the right who have deep objections to homosexuality — in or out of marriage. But the best arguments against same-sex marriage have nothing to do with animus toward gays but reverence for marriage. In other words, opponents care more about doing what is best for marriage (and by extension, children) than what is best for gays.

That is not automatically bigotry any more than it's automatically anti-Semitism if Catholics spend more time worrying about the state of Catholicism than they do about the state of Judaism.

Conservatives like to argue that if we can redefine marriage to mean unions between two men or two women, we can redefine it to mean a union among three, four or 12 people as well. After all, polygamy has far greater historical and biblical support than monogamy.

What about polygamy?

Intellectually, this argument strikes me as entirely sound. The male-female nature of marriage is far less arbitrary and abstract than the number 2. Politically, I think it's a bit more of a stretch. But what if instead of arguing about gay marriage today, we were arguing about polygamy?

One benefit would be that the news media couldn't fall into their comfort zone of dividing the world into the forces of bigotry and enlightenment, while arguments for the traditional institution of marriage wouldn't be instantaneously cast as oogah-boogah talk from religious savages.

The irony in all this is that while the best arguments against same-sex marriage are about the importance of marriage, so are the best arguments for it — as we saw in the discussion before the Supreme Court last week. Everyone thinks marriage is vital and important. One side thinks it's so vital that gays cannot justly be excluded from it; the other thinks it's so important that we can't afford to redefine it on a whim.

Personally, I'm very sympathetic to arguments for gay marriage. If it were possible, I would simply leave it up to the states with the proviso that no religious institution can ever be compelled to recognize unions unsanctioned by their faith, just as the Catholic Church today doesn't recognize many second marriages. But, perhaps because I am a conservative and don't therefore immediately assume opponents are bigots, I find many of the arguments against gay marriage reasonable.

If you start from the bigoted premise that conservatives are bigots, same-sex marriage is a no-brainer. If you start from the premise that gays are just icky and shouldn't be tolerated, then the issue is easy, too.

But if you start with the assumption that there's goodwill on all sides, it becomes much more complicated.

Jonah Goldberg is editor at large of National Review Onlineand a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is also a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.
