An Open Letter to Gay Marriage Opponents

Ed Brayton is a frequent contributor to the science blog The Panda's Thumb and the new group legal blog Positive Liberty. You can read more of his writing at his own Blog, Dispatches From the Culture Wars.

Recently I was watching an HBO comedy special starring Ellen Degeneres. I only watched her sitcom a few times when it was on, but I've always thought she was quite funny and original. And I've always respected the way she handled that big "coming out" show that got so much attention. She didn't lose sight of the fact that it had to be funny, and it was. At the end of this special, she did something unusual - she turned up the lights and took questions from the audience. And after a few questions, a young woman stood up and started talking about how Ellen's coming out gave her the strength to be honest in her own life and escape her own closet, and as she talked about how enormously that changed her life, she began to cry. Ellen told her to come down to the stage, and she laid down on the edge of the stage so she could be down face to face with this woman, and she just hugged her. I'm sure there wasn't a dry eye in the place, and mine were no exception.

As I watched this, I thought to myself, why can't you see this? Why can't you see the humanity in this? This was a real person experiencing the same emotions that we all feel, except that their feelings were brought on primarily by the denunciation and judgement aimed at them by you and those who think like you. It brought home to me the message I learned during that comical moment I spoke of before when I tried to tell my lesbian friend that Melissa Etheridge couldn't be gay because all her songs were about relationships and heartache (!). It was one of those moments when you just smack your forehead and go DUH. Of course they go through the same range of emotions the rest of us go through in relationships. You know why? Because they're not "just like us", they ARE us. They're people, and at the core, we're all the same. We all laugh and cry and get angry and happy; we all seek out connection and acceptance. It is through our shared emotional experiences that we discover that undeniable fact.

I've mentioned before that Lynn has been the head of the AIDS task force at her hospital and president of the local support group, and I've told some stories of the people she has befriended there. She has counseled with dozens of AIDS patients and their families. Maybe the worst part of that for her has been how often she has had to make all of the funeral arrangements for someone who died of that horrible disease because their families had shunned them. Many a funeral she has had to attend where no one in the family of the deceased even came to pay their respects and grieve. Can you imagine anything so barbaric, so inhumane, so un-Christian? And in the midst of that inhumanity is a man who owns a funeral home in the area. He has told Lynn that if one of her people dies without the means or the family to pay for the funeral, just call him. He'll take care of it, and he has for many people already. Which person do you think would draw the approval of God, the one who abandons a loved one because they disapprove of their lifestyle or the one who bears the burden of strangers to make it a little lighter on others?

I'm gonna let a little secret out. When you charge that those of us who push for gay marriage are just trying to "legitimize" gay relationships....you're right. Guilty as charged. I absolutely want to legitimize those relationships. I want to put them on equal legal footing and, yes, equal moral footing with straight relationships. I want people and society as a whole to view those relationships no differently than they view any other relationship because that is an important step toward allowing gay people the same dignity that the rest of us take for granted and never have to think about. Because maybe when that happens, when it becomes so common that it's just a matter of routine, no one will ever again have to arrange a funeral for someone they barely know because their family disowned them. And maybe when that happens, we'll have less of those funerals happen as a result of the self-loathing that your perpetual messages of indignity instill in those you think are different from you.

John Scalzi, many months ago, wrote an essay whose eloquence I cannot match. In it, he said:

On what grounds do I as a married person tell others who want to be married that they are undeserving of the joy and comfort I've found in the married state? What right do I have morally to say that I deserve something that they do not? If I believe that every American deserves equal rights, equal protections and equal responsibilities and obligations under the law, how may I with justification deny my fellow citizens this one thing? Why must I be required to denigrate people I know, people I love and people who share my life to sequester away a right of mine that is not threatened by its being shared? Gays and lesbians were at my wedding and celebrated that day with me and my wife and wished us nothing less than all the happiness we could stand for the very length of our lives. On what grounds do I refuse these people of good will the same happiness, the same celebration, the same courtesy?

I support gay marriage because I support marriage. I support gay marriage because I support equal rights under the law. I support gay marriage because I want to deny those who would wall off people I know and love as second-class citizens. I support gay marriage because I like for people to be happy, and happy with each other. I support gay marriage because I love to go to weddings, and this means more of them. I support gay marriage because my marriage is strengthened rather than lessened by it -- in the knowledge that marriage is given to all those who ask for its blessings and obligations, large and small, until death do they part. I support gay marriage because I should. I support gay marriage because I am married.

Gay marriage, in one form or another, is inevitable. You will ultimately fail to stop it from spreading just as surely as the forces of reaction could not stop the promises of human freedom made in the Declaration of Independence from being extended to other marginalized groups in our nation's past. But rather than being a threat to the things you hold sacred, I urge you to view this as an opportunity. An opportunity to rethink your prejudices. An opportunity to recognize in those you reject the very things you celebrate in those you accept - their mutual capacity for joy and sorrow, good and bad, laughter and tears. Because the truth, whether you want to admit it now or not, is that they aren't just like us, they are us. And that is a message that I cannot leave only to my gay friends to send; I am compelled to speak up and say it with them, to embrace our common humanity and refuse to let the voices of intolerance draw lines between us that don't exist.

Jesus said, "Whatever you do to the least of these, my brethren, you do unto me also." I can't think of a more powerful invocation of our shared humanity. When you fire your derision at gays, you not only hurt them, you hurt those of us who care about them. When you deny to them the protections and priveleges that you take for granted, you diminish those protections for all of us. In robbing them of their dignity, you diminish your own as well. If you can find a way to view this as an opportunity instead of a threat, I promise you that American society will be strengthened, not weakened. We will be strengthened because, when faced with the choice, we chose the example of the funeral director's kindness to strangers over the bigot's rejection of those he claimed to care for.