With the divorce rate hovering at 50 percent of all traditional marriages,
with roughly only 50 percent of all families fitting into the nuclear, two
opposite-sex parents-mold, and straight couples, with increasing
frequency, electing to eschew marriage and to “live in sin,” where can
conservative, fundamentalist Christians place the blame for the erosion
of America’s moral fabric?
Gays and lesbians seeking to get married legally have unwittingly become the most obvious and most vulnerable scapegoats and targets of those who would demonize gay marriage as the
greatest threat ever to legal heterosexual couplings.
I Ask You
Why else would James Dobson’s “Focus on the Family” group donate $250,000
to the California Marriage Protection Act initiative campaign to
overturn the California Supreme Court ruling by putting a referendum on
the November ballot to define marriage as between a man and a woman?
Dobson’s spurious reasoning declares on his website that California’s
“judicially imposed social experiment has hastened the demise of
religious freedom across the United States.”
And lest we far too easily forget, Karl Rove’s brilliant
orchestration and exploitation of the bogeyman hot-button issue of
same-sex marriage in key red states in 2004 resulted in Dubya's
re-election and disastrous second term in the White House.
In all, well-organized and almost obscenely well-funded evangelical
groups are expected to expend about $20 million to defeat the measure.
Even the name of one of the most militant anti-gay marriage groups is risible: “Bakersfield Citizens Opposed to Obscenity and Lewdness,” most especially in view of the truism that both
obscenity and lewdness reside largely in the eye of the beholder.
Undoubtedly, the biggest worry of the anti-gay marriage forces is
that as same-sex marriages becomes more commonplace, fears and concerns
about them will fade away.
It is precisely for that reason that they attempted so desperately, albeit unsuccessfully, to get the Supreme
Court to issue a stay on the ruling until after the November elections.
One Illustration of Hyperbolic Response
An egregious example of the hyperbole and blatant homophobia that
anti-gay marriage extremists will resort to comes from the “Alliance for
Marriage,” which issued this misleading missive in response to the state
of New York’s announcement that it will recognize all unions performed
in California:
“The governor of New York state will declare hundreds of
years of marriage law to be null and void….The governor of New York
state will force California-style marriages on all the families and
children of his own state.”
As threatening as Massachusetts’ legalization of gay marriage in 2004
was to the Religious Right, California by far poses a much more serious
challenge with no residency requirement and as the bellwether of likely
future trends for the rest of the nation.
As if to counter most of the hate-filled invective advanced by
evangelicals hell-bent on destroying the right of gays and lesbians to
wed legally, in a superbly supportive editorial in the Los Angeles Times
on June 17, the first day of legal gay marriage, the editors wrote in an
editorial entitled “The right to love.”
“Same-sex couples are not upending the institution of marriage, nor are their supporters. Rather, they are engaged in a profoundly conservative act: They ask not to abolish marriage but to uphold it… And they prompt at least one
more question for those who disapprove: How can the state’s blessing on
these acts of love in any way diminish us?”
Mr. Akerley is a Culver City resident
