Gay Marriage and Why I am Sick of Talking About It

I have been absent from the blogosphere lately due to a number of reasons, including watching my (single, heterosexual) best friend have her baby and a recent conversation over at Opine Editorials and on my own blog.

I am attempting to sift through personal attacks and just plain mean-spirited, evasive responses to get to the real issues here in the gay marriage debate.

I am convinced now that the issue is much more complex than I originally thought and that many people can't see beyond their own prejudices on both sides of the issue.

The first, and most visible side to me (as a gay marriage advocate) is that of what we usually call "the homophobes." We see them in anonymous internet chat rooms, and as private citizens who vote against anything that has to do with giving gay people rights to form families, get married, or end job discrimination and hate crimes. Quite simply, they usually don't know any gay people, they have had a bad experience with one or two gay people, their religion tells them gay is wrong, or they just hate gay people because their parents and/or members of society taught them to and they never questioned it. Their reasons for wanting anti-gay measures to pass lie in the one fact that being gay is bad, sinful, perverse, or against the Bible or other major religious book.

These people are the reasons most of us LGBT folk (though not all) are fighting for equality. They are the ones we see in groups of 10 or so picketing gay pride parades and passing out Bible passages condemning homosexuality.

They enrage us, they incite us, and they often make us bitter.

Homophobes threaten our very existence. They would love for us to not exist, or at the very least, to be invisible to them and everyone else. They are oblivious to their own heterosexual privilege and see any attempt to normalize gay and lesbian relationships as a threat and "shoving sexuality in their faces." They see nothing wrong with making out with and groping their girlfriends or boyfriends in public while shunning a gay couple for walking down the sidewalk holding hands.

While these people are easy to counter and argue with, I don't believe they should be the sole reason to fight for gay marriage. In fact, I wish we could just ignore them until they change their minds. Unfortunately, because they rely so often on lies, defamation, and propaganda we can not ignore them. To ignore them would be giving up our voices to defend ourselves against their malicious attacks, as well as defending ourselves to the rest of society, to whom the homophobes are feeding misinformation.

Another set of anti gay marriage folks are the "gender integrationists." These folks are aplenty (or a couple) at Opine Editorials and elsewhere. They are the folks who insist on innate, immutable gender roles and the importance of a biological mommy and (most importantly) a daddy in every child's life regardless of circumstance. They often can not even acknowledge that sometimes (often, even) a biological mommy, daddy, baby situation just is not in the best interest of the child(ren) they claim to want to protect. They are also against gay couples adopting children on that same basis of them allegedly selfishly "intentionally depriving a child of a mother or father."

I would love to continue a discussion on gender roles. However, I am not inclined to discuss it with those who rely on knee-jerk reactions of "innate gender roles" without reputable evidence to back it up. Obviously, to me, gender is part biology/evolution and part social upbringing. Some things (like physical size and strength) are innate and biologically based, but many (like women belong in the home and only men should work) are not. Because there are biological differences in gender, I believe, is no reason to continue to perpetuate societal gender roles that have outgrown any evolutionary usefulness.

I wholeheartedly acknowledge that many boys may need a strong male role model in their lives, and girls a strong female role model. But I am not willing to discount gays and lesbians from adopting children on that basis alone, when role models can be people other than parents. I have seen the studies showing that adopted children of gay and lesbian families turn out just as "good" as those of heterosexual families.

I have also seen the many position statements that acknowledge this. Have our opponents?

Do they really attribute the entire body of scientific evidence regarding children raised by gay and lesbian parents to some vast liberal gay agenda?

Really?

I wonder why, if people claim to not be biased against gays and lesbians and not have ulterior motives, one would ignore all the most recent professional statements and research.

Sometimes it truly is hard to sift through the various agendas to get to what is really the heart of the matter. I am concerned that some of the fellas at Opine Editorials are either deceitful about their motives in the gay marriage debate, or not able to articulate what is important to them if they are so unwilling to concede what medical professionals and child welfare leagues are saying really is best for children.

That is where I misunderstand them a lot of the time.

It is true that our relationships demand the same respect as heterosexual relationships. Why? Because just as heterosexuals' romantic relationships and families are the epicenter of their lives, so are ours.

It is also true that gay marriage and federal, state, and local legal recognition of these relationships is one major step in the right direction towards true equality and lessening of discrimination, violence, and other unfair behaviors towards LGB (and sometimes T) people.

However, I now believe that one step in the fight for the end of discrimination is acknowledging that, on a basic level, gay couples will never be the same as straight couples in one major way: the ability to procreate.

Do I think this means that gay couples should be banned from marrying each other? No.

But I think if a change were to be made in the overall definition of marriage, there definitely needs to be a conversation regarding procreative rights, genetic engineering, and adoption.

Further because a change in the definition of marriage warrants discussion of these complex issues is NO reason to immediately deny the rights of gay people to get married on the basis of "it just being too complicated a discussion." I understand that many people are traditionalists and will automatically discount gay marriage on that basis alone. However, it just is not fair to continue to reward one type of romantic relationship legally and socially, while punishing another just as valid type. If one agrees that that type of relationship is valid and deserves respect. If one believes in human dignity.

Heterosexual couples, by their very nature, usually are able to biologically bear children that are genetically related to both parents. However, if they are not able to do so because of infertility, they can choose to undergo various fertility and/or family planning options, including artificial insemination, donor eggs, surrogate motherhood, adoption, and IVF treatment.

In that sense, a couple who undergoes any such treatment will usually only be biologically related to one parent. Or in the case of adoption, the child will not be related genetically to either parent. So it is my opinion that so long as heterosexual couples can legally pursue these methods of fertilization and family-planning, so should gay and lesbian couples be allowed. Regardless of whether their relationship is called "marriage," "domestic partnership," or "civil union."

As John Howard has brought up in previous blog comments, technology may be available in the future that allows same-sex conception of gametes that are genetically related (but we don't know how related) to both members of the couple.*

His major concerns with this technology appear to be that it is bad public health policy (resources diverted towards follow-up on children created this way, potential problems stemming from the new technology costing even more resources, poor segments of the population retaining the inheritable diseases while rich segments get to pick and choose their children's genetics, all that resulting in contempt for poor people and their natural diseases). As a public health person myself, I can acknowledge that these, finally, seem like real issues in the gay marriage debate.

If this truly is what many people fear with the passage of gay marriage, though, then why not shift the focus from defamation of gay people to one of a discussion on genetic engineering? Further, genetic engineering also does not only include gay and lesbian couples. Nor do I think that any of this should preclude a gay and lesbian couple from equal marriage rights. I think a compromise could be reached that banned gay couples from conceiving genetically engineered children together (until more is known on the topic) and still giving them legal benefits and protections, as well as adoption rights and the same rights to fertility treatments that heterosexual couples have.

I don't think many people have even thought that far ahead from their own knee-jerk disgust with gays and lesbians.

I would LOVE for the discussion to, for once, go beyond that. I would love to learn more about genetic engineering.

I guess I am just bored with arguing about and justifying my relationship to people who will never understand what being gay truly means.

But I would like this article to open a peaceful discussion on genetic engineering if anyone is interested.


[I am purposefully ignoring John Howard's sentence for the time being: "We also need to figure out how to produce fewer gay people who are unable to love someone they can have kids with."]