Dialogue on “gay marriage”

Another possible dialogue:

Alter: You’re invited to my daughter’s wedding—she’s marrying her partner Louise!

Ego: Don’t think I can make it.

Alter [suspicious]: Why not?

Ego: It’s not something I can celebrate.

Alter: Why not?

Ego: I don’t think the sexual union of two women is a good thing.

Alter: What business is it of yours?

Ego: It’s my business what I celebrate.

Alter: But it’s not about you, it’s about her happiness. She went through hell before she met Louise, and now she’s finally getting her life in order and you won’t celebrate that!

Ego: I can’t celebrate someone putting her life in an order that I think is wrong. She may feel strongly about this but I feel strongly too.

Alter: What’s wrong with someone trying for happiness and stability with someone she loves in the only way she’s ever going to get it?

Ego: I can’t know everything about her situation, but if I’m asked for support I have to make some sort of judgment. And it seems to me that homosexuality—especially public homosexuality that wants equal status with sexuality as it normally develops—is antisocial. It says there’s nothing specially good about being a man or a woman or about expectations about how they’re going to act toward each other. And as to happiness, I have my doubts. Sex can’t be nailed down just by a ceremony. It needs a setting in which the ceremony makes sense. When sex develops normally it’s connected in all sorts of ways to its natural function, which is childbearing. That makes its natural expression a long-term commitment between two people who are complementary to each other. In the case of homosexuality you don’t have that. Why be optimistic enough to give it public support?

[Discussion then either goes downhill beyond retrieval, or continues, drawing on previous discussions of “homophobia”, homosexuality in general, and “gay marriage” in particular.]
Posted by Jim Kalb at May 22, 2002 11:09 AM | Send