Evangelical Christians Attack Marriage Equality

Here we go again! Religious-based heterosexual supremacists are continuing their millenia-long subjugation of LGBT people. The Manhattan Declaration has been released, courtesy of Good As You. Here is an excerpt:

No one has a civil right to have a non-marital relationship treated as a marriage. Marriage is an objective reality—a covenantal union of husband and wife—that it is the duty of the law to recognize and support for the sake of justice and the common good. If it fails to do so, genuine social harms follow. First, the religious liberty of those for whom this is a matter of conscience is jeopardized. Second, the rights of parents are abused as family life and sex education programs in schools are used to teach children that an enlightened understanding recognizes as “marriages” sexual partnerships that many parents believe are intrinsically non-marital and immoral. Third, the common good of civil society is damaged when the law itself, in its critical pedagogical function, becomes a tool for eroding a sound understanding of marriage on which the flourishing of the marriage culture in any society vitally depends. Sadly, we are today far from having a thriving marriage culture. But if we are to begin the critically important process of reforming our laws and mores to rebuild such a culture, the last thing we can afford to do is to re-define marriage in such a way as to embody in our laws a false proclamation about what marriage is.

It's fascinating how they sustain the fiction of religious liberty being jeopardized by civil marriage laws being changed! I think the source of this intellectual disconnect is a profound misunderstanding of what the notion of a civil, pluralistic society is. In a civil pluralistic society, different people can hold diametrically opposed views but the government provides rights and responsibilities equally to all.

The second argument is simply stupid. Are they going to call for no public education programs to teach about partnerships that parents feel are "intrinsically non-marital or immoral"? Will they call for legislation to that effect? I thought we got past the "no promo homo" language in the early 1990s. Have they not heard of the first Amendment? The government doesn't get to favor one view over another. So, either kids will learn nothing about sexuality and adult relationships (which is probably what these evangelicals would prefer) or they have to learn about all.

The third argument is simply a lamentation that they are losing the argument in the Courts.