by Dan Savage
Brown advanced the Natural Law argument against marriage equality again and again during our debate. The argument boils down to essentially this: Marriage is about—marriage is only about—male and female coming together, becoming one flesh, and making babies. Marriage bonds male and female together for life in recognition of this basic biological fact: man + woman = baby. Since two men can’t make a baby, they can never become one flesh, so obviously two men shouldn’t be allowed to marry.
And yet we allow infertile couples, elderly couples, and couples that don’t want to have babies to marry. No one checks to make sure that married opposite-sex couples are consummating their marriages—there are more happy and purely companionate marriages out there than anyone realizes—and no one tells married straight couples who adopt, either by choice or necessity, that their marriages aren’t real. We allow murderers on death row to marry, people who are physically incapable of engaging in sex to marry—so long as they’re straight.11
The Natural Law argument isn’t an argument at all. It’s a head fake.
It’s not NOM’s only anti-marriage equality argument that’s grounded in a ridiculous double standard. According to NOM, marriage isn’t about the needs of adults, or the rights of adults, it’s about the needs of children.12 Marriage is about a child’s right to his or her biological mother and father, married to one another, for life. Yet children—biological children, adopted children (who are also biological)—aren’t mentioned in standard-issue marriage vows. The only time we’re told that children define marriage is when same-sex couples want to marry. Never mind that many gay couples—a third of all gay couples—are raising children.
The double standards don’t stop with children. Opponents of marriage equality tell us that marriage is defined not just by children, but by monogamy and faith—but, again, only when gay couples want to marry. Straight couples, married or not, can have children or not have children. Straight couples can be married without being monogamous and monogamous without being married. Straight couples can marry in church or they can marry at city hall. No one tells childless married couples that they aren’t really married. No one tells nonmonogamous married straight couples that they aren’t really married. (There have certainly been no attempts to ban nonmonogamous heterosexual marriages!) And no one is attempting to ban atheists from marrying.
Hands down my favorite moment during the debate—the whole left-wing blogosphere’s favorite—was a brief exchange about divorce. Brown repeatedly cited his Catholic faith as a reason why marriage should be restricted to opposite-sex couples only. The Catholic Church condemns gay sex and gay relationships, so same-sex couples—Catholic or not—should not be allowed to marry, according to Brown. But the Catholic Church regards divorce as sinful and Jesus explicitly condemns divorce. Would Brown support a ban on divorce?13 For Catholics and non-Catholics alike?
BROWN: No, because you believe something is wrong, doesn’t mean you make it illegal.
SAVAGE: Then why not the same policy toward civil gay marriage?
BROWN: But that is—but again, there’s a misunderstanding here. Gay marriage cannot exist. There cannot be a marriage of two men or two women. Just because the state—
SAVAGE: It exists in Canada and Spain…
BROWN: Just because the state says it’s so, this is not based upon reality.
You can’t argue with that kind of logic—because it’s not logic. It’s circular reasoning. And along with double standards and a set of goalposts on wheels, circular reasoning is all Brown’s got.
Days later, on his blog, Brown wrote this about the Dinner Table Debate: “I took the opportunity to defend the Bible from the most radical charge Dan Savage hurled—that the Bible is a radically pro-slavery document. He uses that charge to undermine the moral authority of the Bible as the word of God. If it got slavery wrong, Dan maintains, what are the odds it gets human sexuality right? Zero, according to Dan Savage.”
It annoys people who believe that the Bible is without error when you bring up slavery. The people it annoys most, of course, are the ones who insist that the Bible—which got something as easy and obvious as slavery wrong—somehow managed to get something as complicated as human sexuality right.
Here’s what Brian said about slavery during our debate:
As far as slavery goes, again, you’re just completely wrong. Your interpretation of Scripture, Sam Harris’s interpretation of Scripture, is completely wrong. If you look at the societies and cultures in which Jews lived, if you look at the Code of Hammurabi, for example, you see that a master over a slave had total control of life and death, could do anything at will, essentially. That is not the case in Judaism. Is a certain form of slavery accepted? Yes. But if you move to the New Testament, this is much more like indentured servitude. People would sell themselves essentially into a period of indentured servitude, usually between six and seven years, and then they could be released, and they could get money for that.
Hard to square Brown’s claims about slavery with this from the Old Testament (Leviticus 25:44–46):
As for your male and female slaves whom you may have: You may buy male and female slaves from the nations that are round about you…they may be your property. You may bequeath them to your sons after you, to inherit as a possession forever.
And it’s even harder to square Brown’s claims about slavery with this from the New Testament (Timothy 6:1–4):
Let all who are under the yoke of slavery regard their masters as worthy of all honor, so that the name of God and the teaching may not be defamed. Those who have believing masters must not be disrespectful on the grounds that they are brethren; rather they must serve all the better since those who benefit from their services are believers and beloved…. If anyone teaches otherwise and does not agree with the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ and the teaching which accords with Godliness, he is puffed up with conceit, he knows nothing.
But I let it go during the debate. There was so much else to argue about, so many double standards to point out, so much dizzying circular logic to chase after. But others quickly called bullshit on Brown’s effort to exonerate the Bible.
“It is a routine lie of Christian apologetics that slavery in the Roman imperial period (in the first and second centuries CE, when the New Testament was being written) was largely indentured servitude of a temporary nature,” Don M. Burrows, a scholar at the University of Minnesota wrote on his blog after watching the Dinner Table Debate. “This is a flat-out lie. No scholar of antiquity that I am aware of would make such a claim, because all of our evidence says otherwise.
“In the Roman period,” Burrows continues, “the period when the New Testament was actually written, slavery was largely the product of war. Captives were made slaves, and when they reproduced, those slaves belonged to the master. While it’s true that slaves were freed in large numbers and could even go on to vote and have successful careers, that doesn’t mean the institution itself was any less brutal or wrong, or that it was merely a temporary station used to make money. It was not.”
In the Bible, Paul failed to make a distinction between “good” slavery (voluntary or involuntary servitude) and “bad” slavery (American-style slavery, a kind of slavery that existed at the time Paul was writing but that Paul—and Jesus and John the Baptist and the rest of the gang—failed to condemn). Pious Christian slave owners in the Civil War era certainly didn’t regard slavery in any way as anti-Christian. Slave owners and their apologists leaned on the Bible.
“Slaveholding theologians had little trouble in demonstrating that the Bible did sanction slavery and that, specifically, God had sanctioned slaveholding among His chosen people of Israel,” Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese wrote in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion. The abolitionists, they continue, “lost the battle of scholarly inquiry into the nature of the Israelite social system. The slaveholders’ version stood up during the antebellum debates and has been overwhelmingly confirmed by moder
n scholarship. The abolitionists found themselves driven to argue that slavery contradicted the spirit of the Bible, especially of the New Testament, even though Jesus and the Apostles, who denounced every possible sin, nowhere spoke against it.”
In fairness, as these scholars noted, the Christian opponents of slavery in the United States also cited the Bible. Modern Christians who are uncomfortable with the Bible’s clear and unambiguous support for and acceptance of slavery—or those who aren’t aware of it (because they’re incapable of googling New Testament and slavery for themselves)—will sometimes toss this fact down like a trump card. But while the actions of Christians who fought slavery speaks well of them, their actions do not exonerate the Bible or erase “slaves, obey your earthly masters” from the New Testament.
The Bible got slavery wrong. It got other things right—the Golden Rule, the Greatest Commandment—and yes, some people were inspired to combat what the Bible got wrong (“slaves, obey your earthly masters”) with what the Bible managed to get right. (Galatians 3:28: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”) The Bible is a sprawling and contradictory text and bad people have used the Bible to justify bigotry and oppression and good people have used the Bible to fight bigotry and oppression. That only shows that the Bible is only as good and decent as the person reading it.
But even if Brown were correct—even if they practiced a kinder, gentler form of slavery when the Bible was being assembled (and he is not correct)—there’s no kinder, gentler way to stone your daughter to death for not being a virgin on her wedding night. (How many brides were stoned to death for failing to bleed when they lost their virginities to their husbands on their wedding nights?)
Even if the Bible got slavery right, it still got that—and a great deal else—tragically wrong.
If you watched the Dinner Table Debate on YouTube—http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oG804t0WG-c—you only saw the first hour. Brian, Mark, and I continued to argue long after the cameras were turned off; the camera crew joined in after we stopped filming, and John, leaning against the counter in the kitchen, lobbed some questions our way. A second bottle of wine was opened.
Terry had returned after an hour, expecting that the debate would be over, and he was annoyed to find us still deep in discussion. After another hour passed, Terry began to get angry—with me and with Mark. The camera crew had packed up and left, but Mark and Brian and I were still sitting at the dining room table, still arguing, and, as far as Terry was concerned, enjoying ourselves far too much. At one point I looked up and Terry was standing in the door to the dining room, directly behind Brian Brown, making slicing motions across his neck and mouthing the word “ENOUGH.”
With no sign that the debate would ever stop—Mark kept peppering Brown with questions—Terry finally marched into the dining room, walked around the table, faced Brian Brown, and said that he had one question for him.
“Do you think our son should be taken away from us?”
Brian made an effort to look pained. He almost pulled it off.
“You shouldn’t ask me a question when you know you won’t like the answer,” Brown said.
Terry took a breath, shot a look at me that said “three weeks in Hawaii,” then turned to Brown, raised his arm, and pointed a finger at the front door.
“Get the fuck out of my house,” Terry said.
Brown got his moment of intolerance. I’m sure he was disappointed that it wasn’t captured on film, but here it is in print, as a consolation prize. Terry refused to tolerate Brown’s intolerance—well, that’s not entirely fair. Terry had tolerated Brian’s intolerance for nearly four hours. But he had reached his limit and he couldn’t tolerate Brown’s intolerance for another minute longer. It’s too bad the moment wasn’t captured on film: If it had been, Terry wouldn’t have to pay for a drink in a gay bar ever again.
Brown didn’t respond to Terry. He looked at Mark and said, “Well, I guess it’s time to go then.”
Terry crossed through the living room and opened the front door as Mark and Brian rose from the table and made their way to the foyer. They were standing by the door facing me, their backs to Terry, as I shook Brown’s hand one last time. Terry was standing behind Mark, quietly seething, holding the door open. When Mark said he had just one more question for us—just one more—Terry picked up an imaginary knife and started stabbing Mark in the back.
“Who do you think is winning?” Mark asked. “Your side, Dan? Or yours, Brian?”
Our side was winning, I said: An unbroken series of polls showed that a majority of Americans now supported marriage equality. Brian said his side was winning: An unbroken string of victories at the ballot box—thirty-two in a row—showed that majorities of Americans, whenever they are given a chance to vote, reject same-sex marriage. Every single time marriage equality had been on the ballot, Brown pointed out, voters had rejected it.
“We are on a winning streak that shows no signs of stopping,” Brown said.
Three months later NOM’s winning streak came to an abrupt end when majorities in Washington, Maine, and Maryland voted to legalize same-sex marriage, and voters in Minnesota declined to add an anti-gay-marriage amendment to their state constitution.
The tide is turning and we’re winning.14 But Brown isn’t losing. This isn’t a zero-sum game. Nothing has been taken from straight couples in states where all couples can marry. We all win when everyone is free. It’s just that some of us, sadly, are incapable of seeing that.
So who won the debate?
Terry did, obviously. I mean, come on.15
“Let me pose a question to the Dan Savages of the world,” Brown wrote on his blog after our dinner date. “Once gay people were a powerless and defenseless minority. Now, you have organized, protested, and become powerful through the use of democratic freedoms and intellectual debate, a powerful cultural force in our time. What use do you intend to make of your power?”
Well, Brian, I can’t speak for all the Dan Savages of the world, and there are quite a few—sorry guys, when I am being attacked by Fox News and their devoted followers, I am sure you have to deal with a lot of misdirected anger too—but I’ll take this question.
But before I respond to the question, Brian, let’s get this out of the way: I can see what you’re doing with that “You gays are sooooo politically powerful, Dan, such a powerful cultural force to be reckoned with!” stuff.
“The ‘gays are politically powerful’ theme is part of a long-standing effort to falsely paint lesbians and gay men as wealthy, privileged, sophisticated people who don’t need legal protections against discrimination,” Kate Kendell, the executive director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, argues. “It is a dangerous idea, and totally false.”
But on to your question, Brian. What do the Dan Savages of the world intend to do with our power?
Despite your claims that we’re the intolerant ones, Brian, LGBT people are willing to tolerate people who dislike us. We’re willing to tolerate your marriages and your churches. We’re willing to tolerate your contempt. What we can’t tolerate—what we will not tolerate—is the status quo. So long as gay people are not equal under the law, so long as organizations like NOM are working to deny us full equality, we’re going to fight you.
What are our plans for after we achieve full equality?
You can rest assured, Brian, that we aren’t planning to amend state constitutions to prevent straight people from marrying. We have no desire to pass laws blocking adoptions by straight couples. We will fight until we have secured equal protection under the law—for all LGBT people, not just those of us who wish to marry—and then, well, then we’re done. We will remain vigilant, of course, to protect our rights, but there’s no top-secret, post-equality gay agenda that you need to worry about. We have no plans to seize control of the gold supply. We are not going to force the National Institutes of Health to divert funds from cancer r
esearch to genetically engineered unicorns. Peter LaBarbera will not be kicked off Twitter. Tony Perkins will not be dragged to gay weddings in chains and forced to serve as flower girl.
Once we achieve equality under the law straight people still will be free to disapprove of our marriages—and priests and ministers and rabbis will be free to refuse to officiate at our weddings—just as straight people are free to disapprove of each other’s marriages right now. Literally nothing will change. Just as people are still free to believe that Jews should have to live in walled ghettos, women shouldn’t be allowed to vote, and black people shouldn’t be able to sit at their lunch counters, the Brian Browns of the world will still be free to believe that gay people shouldn’t be allowed to marry. The only difference will be this: You won’t be free to prevent us from marrying, Brian, just as anti-Semites aren’t free to compel Jews to live in ghettos, misogynists aren’t free to stop women from voting, and racists aren’t free to refuse service to black people.
And after we’ve secured equal protection under the law, Brian, we will struggle to get by, knowing that there are still people out there who hate us. We will pause now and then, at brunch or before the curtain goes up at a Broadway show, to silently reflect on the haters and bigots, and we will ache for the LGBT kids unlucky enough to be born into hateful and bigoted families. But we will not hound you or persecute you. And, no, expecting you to obey the law—expecting you to obey the same antidiscrimination laws that prevent your fellow bigots from discriminating against people based on their race, gender, and faith—is not persecution. A hotel owner doesn’t have to approve of interracial marriage, but he can’t refuse to rent a room to an interracial couple. A hotel owner may not approve of my marriage, but it is illegal in Washington State for him to refuse to rent a room to a gay couple just the same.