Against same-sex marriage? You could be making a big assumption with significant implications without realising it.

 If you believe same-sex relationships are wrong, based all or in part on the teachings of the Bible, and if you assume it necessarily follows that you should be against the legalisation of same-sex marriage, I’d like to suggest there may be important things you haven’t yet considered.

 

If you believe this is an important topic, I submit that this note is worthy of your attention, even if you are convinced that your conviction about this may not be swayed, and I ask you to read on.

 

Let us start by making some assumptions, which I hope everyone reading this is either happy with, or is happy to entertain for the purpose of illustrating the argument:

• God created man in his image and created woman from man’s flesh to be his companion, united forever as one body and this is the basis for Christian marriage.
• Sex between a man and a woman is part of God’s design in creation.
• Homosexuals indulge in sexual sin and as a consequence will not inherit the kingdom of God.
• Everybody on this planet is guilty of many counts of sin, which, regardless of the sin or the sinner, all have the same effect vis-à-vis the sinner’s relationship with God.
• The only way into God’s kingdom is through salvation in Jesus Christ. That is to say, without faith, avoiding certain sins or all sin, is both a hopeless and largely pointless endeavour.

 

Now let us establish some undisputed facts:

• Some people do not believe in God, the sacrifice of Jesus Christ or the words of the Bible.
• Some of these people are in romantic relationships.
• Some of these people have the hope and expectation that their relationships will last a life-time and they have the intention and determination to make this a reality.
• Some of these people wish to formalise this commitment with a legal contract.

 

Here we get to the first collection of facts that warrant reflection, not just comprehension.

 

In this country, some of these non-believers in relationships enjoy the privilege of access to a civil institution which confers on them identical rights and responsibilities to an equivalent religious institution that shares the same name: marriage. Religious marriage involves making commitments before God, civil marriage does not, but they both share the word ‘marriage’.

 

Only one of these two kinds of union is Bible-based and yet, while this makes a world of differnce for those of faith,  people who marry under either arrangement describe it as marriage with equal legitimacy. When they tell people they are married, they enjoy equally the privilege (and it is a privilege) of being able to expect most people in society to understand that this means they have made a serious, mutual, life-long and exclusive commitment to one another. Even the most devout and pious Christian would be unlikely to ask a couple if they made their vows before God, before accepting a couple's use of the word marriage to describe their marital status.

 

Then we come to those who do not have this privilege at present. In Britain, if you are in a relationship with someone of the same sex and you are at the stage in your relationship where you want to make that same commitment, you can enter into a contract that gives you the same rights, but it is not marriage.

 

The question at the centre of the whole debate is whether or not this distinction and separation is a good thing.

 

What are the effects of the separation in law of these two kinds of functionally almost identical civil contracts? What are the effects on the same-sex couples? Does making a couple have a civil partnership instead of a marriage bring them any closer to God? In no case could it possibly do that. Does it make them angry, upset and completely confounded as to why it is so important for some people of faith to seek to deny them the right to civil marriage? Not all of them, but many, certainly.

 

What is the effect on society? It says there’s something different about same-sex couples, but it doesn’t say what that difference is, or whether that difference might be anything to do with a creator God. Could there be any negative effects besides the one I've already mentioned? Could there be any reason why it might be a good thing to remove this distinction between the contracts that are available to people of different sexualities – a distinction that is significant but significant in no more than name? While we’re thinking about that, let me ask another question:

 

Why do employees of The White House, UCLA, Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Google, Facebook, EA, Yahoo, Sony, Microsoft, Nokia, Dell, Visa, Lonely Planet, Levi Strauss, Gap, ABC, CBS, Lucasfilm, Dreamworks, Apple, Adobe, Disney and Pixar think they need to join celebrities, politicians and scores of ordinary folk in going to the trouble of making videos like this?

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWYqsaJk_U8

 

It’s six minutes long, which is not a lot of your time to watch through to the end and think about the people in it and the people for whom they’ve made it, since the importance of being able to think outside of one's own perspective and understand people whose experience is different to yours is the point of this whole note.

 

They’re supporting The Trevor Project, a American crisis intervention and suicide prevention organisation for LGBT youth, and if you didn’t see the video, they’re sharing personal stories of the fears and trials they experienced because of their sexuality, including suicide attempts, but telling LGBT youth not to kill themselves or otherwise give up if they’re considering it, because things for them can get better.

 

In the 21st century, in one of the world’s more progressive and liberal countries, such is the prejudice and stigma the still exists around the ‘alternative’ sexualities that three fifths of LGBT youth report they feel unsafe at school because of their sexual orientation, and they are three to four times more likely to commit suicide than their heterosexual peers.

 

If we have laws that arguably achieve nothing for faith – not surprising since that is not what they were created to do – and that certainly don’t do anything for anyone else, but that support the persistence of prejudice and stigma by identifying minorities and separating them from the rest of society, that seems to me a very bad thing indeed.

 

If the Christian view is that gay relationships are not right, what is the best response to fellow citizens who are not of the same view? Can one legislate to prevent people from sinning? Gay sex was decriminalised in Britain only 45 years ago. The law prior to that time didn’t stop people from having gay sex, but it did mean that some went to prison for it, and others had thier lives devastated by unproven accusations of it. Should Christians support recriminalisation of gay sex? As abominable as they may believe it to be, I humbly suggest not.

 

I don’t deny others the right to hold or express beliefs that are opposed to mine, but I will do everything I can to make people stop and think before assuming that their confidence about what they believe is right and wrong makes it simple and obvious what to do with people who hold conflicting beliefs. We should all ask ourselves if there might be more than one way of applying our beliefs, always. If evangelical Christians of committed faith do that, I see no reason why they should think they have an obligation to object to the legalisation of same-sex marriage, indeed I see a clear case to support it.