On the night of Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, Rabbi Daniel Greyber of Beth El Synagogue in Durham gave an eloquent, thoughtful and courageous sermon arguing in favor of gay marriage within the Jewish tradition. He also announced that after many years of thinking about this issue, he would marry Jewish gay and lesbian members of our congregation.
Rabbi Greyber’s talk was a milestone in the history of our congregation, and one of a series of recent events that suggest that the religious and secular advocates for gay marriage have won the long-standing and often rancorous debate. The most important of these events, of course, was the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to reject appeals from several lower federal court decisions that upheld gay marriage.
This decision led to the legalization of gay marriage in North Carolina and will, in all likelihood, soon lead to the same result in the states that currently forbid it.
I have long wrestled with the best arguments for and against gay marriage as a scholar, as a concerned citizen and as a person with gay friends. Yet despite my strong emotional desire to support gay marriage, I find myself opposed to it in principle. I strongly believe that committed gay couples deserve the psychological, material and social benefits that straight married couples enjoy. I therefore opposed Amendment One in North Carolina because it denied gay couples all of these benefits. But I wish that we could have found a way to achieve justice for these couples – perhaps through a means like civil union – without overturning the traditional definition of marriage.
The strongest argument for maintaining the traditional definition of marriage is that it strengthens the view that, all things being equal, children flourish best when raised by a mother and a father and, better yet, by their biological parents. Of course, all things are rarely equal. Many heterosexual parents fail at child rearing while many same-sex parents succeed. Single parents are often wonderful parents. And, finally, people marry for many important reasons other than their desire to have children, whom some couples can’t have and others don’t want.
Yet there is much to be said for the view that American society should publicly endorse the idea that every child deserves a mother and a father. Strengthening this principle enhances current efforts to promote responsible fatherhood at a time when fatherless households in America are becoming less the exception than the rule.
It also supports the view, which I hold, that men and women naturally bring different, complementary and desirable character traits to parenthood. Once gay marriage is firmly entrenched in American law, public institutions, including our schools, will no longer be able to affirm such views.
We now face another, greater danger as the public debate regarding the merits of gay marriage seems to be winding down. Many years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville warned in his classic work, “Democracy in America,” that the United States is prone to an evil that he called the “tyranny of the majority over thought.” He believed that once the majority has reached a consensus on significant moral or political issues, it will stigmatize and ostracize all dissenters, making it difficult if not impossible for their views to be heard. In some cases, people will no longer even know that an alternative point of view exists.
Tocqueville feared that this form of majority tyranny undermines the process of critical thinking that every free society needs to flourish and ill-serves the cause of truth. John Stuart Mill, of course, made similar arguments in “On Liberty,” another classic of liberal thought.
I believe that Tocqueville’s warnings are prescient with respect to the subject of gay marriage today. Our courts, our popular culture and our most powerful opinion-makers now tend to dismiss arguments for traditional marriage out of hand no matter how venerable or how well-reasoned they are. They also tend to view proponents of these arguments as ignorant, bigoted and beneath contempt. To my knowledge, this is not generally the case.
I am happy that Beth El Synagogue, my religious community, has become more inclusive and will celebrate with my gay friends who choose to marry. Yet I fear that the long-term losses to American society of legalizing gay marriage will outweigh the long-term gains. I hope that my fear is unfounded. But I also believe that the debate on the merits of gay marriage must continue in a thoughtful, civil manner. Otherwise, the market place of ideas we all should cherish will be a little less free.
Dr. Sanford Kessler teaches political science at N.C. State University.
