The Religious Right’s Anti-Gay-Marriage movement may be another stealth effort designed to open the legal floodgates to more regulation of marriage, divorce, and sexual relationships generally.

[Credit to a Rick Boston Diary for suggesting this topic.]

An anti-gay marriage Amendment breaks the Constitution’s silence about love and sex

The US Constitution as interpretted by the Supreme Court doesn’t give the States and the Federal Government much power to control love and sex relationships, marriage, or divorce. An anti-gay Constitutional Amendment changes that, paving the way for more Amendments, and more regulations, prohibitions, and punishments.

Once the floodgates are opened to the Bible-based regulation of love relationships through Constitutional Amendment, consider WHAT ELSE may be on the agenda of the Theocratic Right.

Folks, there are good reasons why most of the world does NOT live in theocracies, why Europeans threw off the yoke of the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, and why our US Constitution prohibits an official religion. For eone example of what has happened when religion gets too entwined with government, see Stuff about the Inquisition.

The basis of the anti-gay amendment proposal is the purported Biblical prohibition on gay relationships. Let’s assume the Bible in fact contains the prohibition that the Theocratic Right says it does. With only a small percent, maybe only 2% (or so) of the population being clearly Gay, the Amendment is not going to affect very many people.

Since the Religious Right is extremely committed in their efforts to get a Constitutional Amendment passed affecting such a low percentage of the population, is there a REAL goal in mind, a goal that would affect a GREATER number of people?

Well, the Bible goes much further in parts than merely banning gay relationships - the Bible talks a lot about relationship issues affecting the 98% of the people who are not clearly gay:

• DIVORCE: The Bible bans divorce, doesn’t it? It’s a “good idea” to ban divorce, after all, to hold families together for the kids’ sake, and for society generally, as well as being Biblically mandated. So a general prohibition on divorce could be justified.
• ADULTERY: The Bible calls for torture of adulterers, doesn’t it? Maybe the Theocrats won’t try to pass a torture law, but they certainly would like to discourage adultery by imposing criminal penalties for extra-marital relations. In addition to criminal penalties, wouldn’t it make sense to make the adulterer lose the benefits that society has bestowed upon him - student loans, career, pension, voting rights? Now THAT would go far to prevent illicit relationships, wouldn’t it?
• NON-MARITAL RELATIONS: Could we ban non-marital sex? It’s a sin after all, and leads to disease and abortion. Penalties might be similar to those imposed on adulterers. People who get involved with drugs can lose their entitlement to student loans, and their criminal records can prevent them from receiving certifications and deny them a good career. So we already impose a lifetime of punishment for ONE thing we dispprove of (drugs) - why not add MORE things we disapprove of to the list of things that cause lifetime punishment, and let’s whip this society into shape!
• Those are all things that may be in the mind of the Religious Right, as their REAL goal behind the anti-gay marriage Amendment issue.

CONCLUSION

I’m suspicious of the Theocratic Right’s motives. They are sneaky and dishonest about their political hopes and dreams, and they feel compelled to legislate their dogma. So I look at the dogma, and imagine how the theocrats might be trying to achieve their goal of getting the dogma into law.

The best way to achieve Huge Political Change is to do it incrementally. Take one bite, deal with the consequences, get people used to the change, and then take another bite, etc … That’s the process they’ve followed for decades now.

Slippery slope arguments aren’t intellectually satisfying. That’s because the extremes of the downhill slope seem so foreign right now. But such arguments are emotionally satisfying. The religious right uses them all the time “Approving gay marriage will lead to marriages between man and dog” (thanks to a US Senator for THAT piece of idiocy).

How far have we slipped down the slope toward theocracy already? In the Sixties it would have been UNIMAGINEABLE that a president would dare say he went to war because God told him to. We have come FAR DOWN the slippery slope to theocracy already. I have a whole category of Theocracy-related articles - check them out.

So watch out for the exact language of the anti-gay marriage amendments and laws that are being passed. The Right might try to slip in extra power to regulate other aspects of love relations. But more importantly, get ready for the NEXT round. I can see the Religious Right making a crusade out of other love-related issues, such as I suggested above.