Defending gay marriage like slavery

Obama's announcement last week that he now favors allowing gay marriage was not particularly surprising to me in light of his political approach to the upcoming fall election, but the defense for it given by some of his supporters did come as something of a surprise.

The leftist parts of the church which have abandoned the idea of Biblical morality applauded him, as expected. What was not expected for me was how portions of the church that had claimed to maintain a Biblical view of morality decided to support his direction on this while at the same time admitting that it was in conflict with their moral compass. Some of those folks were interviewed on local television in Atlanta and said things like 'it's just legal stuff, it does not affect our morality'. Many of these folks were African American.

This point of view that somehow the law is not a matter of morality is one that creates much confusion. While it is true that to some degree not all things in the law are matters of morality, like some driving laws or tax laws, it is also true that most criminal law is inherently moral. Murder, stealing, assault, giving false testimony are all matters of both morality and law along with a great many other things. To think that gay marriage as a legal matter is 'just legal stuff' is to ignore the inherent moral nature of the law.

That alone is not what surprised me, however. What surprised me was hearing that kind of argument from African Americans in light of how very similar that argument is to some of the historic arguments that were offered in favor of legal slavery. Some who favored slavery allowed that African slaves were indeed human and would even admit them to some institutions like churches while still defending the idea that slavery could be moral. The equality of humans in the church and before God was one thing while economics was an entirely separate thing and slaves as legal property was 'just legal stuff'. It was shocking to me that African Americans would defend the legalizing of gay marriage with an argument so much like some of the arguments defending slavery.

Slavery is immoral. The arguments against it are fundamentally moral arguments. That was in fact the heart of the civil rights movement, the moral arguments. Gay marriage proponents seek to frame their arguments as civil rights arguments but have failed to be convincing in that effort because homosexual behavior is not inherent to the human condition in the way race is. Many in the African American churches of the U.S. recognize that and have therefore opposed homosexual marriage, and rightly so. To back away from that moral position now is to put their commitment to politics as a higher priority than their moral commitments. It is ironic that the arguments some have used to support Obama are so much like arguments used to try to keep them in slavery.