Dear Person I Went To High School With,
I see you’ve heard about today’s Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, or as you referred to it, “The Day God Left America”, or “the Obamanation”. I know you’re hurt, you’re scared, and you’re having trouble making sense of the world around you right now. I’d like to take a moment to reassure you. With Obamacare being upheld, the confederate flag coming down off of southern state capital buildings, and gays getting married, it must seem to you like we’re mere moments from the rapture, or worse, the rapture has already happened and you’ve been left behind to endure the tribulations. Relax, my friend. The end is not nigh. Hopefully, by the end of this letter, you’ll understand a little bit more about how America works and why, despite the fact that you might not agree with the court’s decision, that it was the right one.
(More after the jump!)
For many years, you might have labored under the notion that the United States was founded as a Christian republic, as a place where good people were free to work to better themselves six days a week and then come together as a community on Sundays, where they would sing hymns and praise the Lord at the Protestant church of their choosing. People of other faiths, or of no faith at all, would of course be free to live here and enjoy the fruits of this bountiful land, as long as they respected the will of the Christian majority. Our laws would be written by godly men, chosen by the voters on the basis of whose family photo looked better in their newspaper ad, to reflect our shared Christian heritage and uphold the highest standards put forth in the Ten Commandments and the other Biblical teachings on which our nation was founded. You might have held that notion because in your experience, that’s exactly how life worked. More or less, our laws have reflected the social mores of the majority - Biblical dogma holds that homosexual conduct is wrong, the majority believes this, therefore gay marriage is forbidden. Since the official position of the government was square with the dogmatic position of the majority, God’s will was being upheld, and all was well. The problem with your notion, however, is that it is entirely mistaken.
You see, the US was not founded as a Christian republic. Our nation was founded to have a government that was explicitly secular - that’s why we have a first amendment, it’s why churches don’t pay taxes. The Founding Fathers’ take on the church/state issue was remarkably similar to Jesus’s when he advised “render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s” - they were suspicious of the influence religion could have on government and vice versa. Thomas Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists is probably the most concise summary of the Founders’ views:
“Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between Church & State. Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.” (Thomas Jefferson, January 1, 1802)
In practice, it’s been impossible to erect a complete wall separating church and state in this country - the majority of our citizens are religious, and when religious people are elected to office, they carry their beliefs with them into service. Usually, that’s a good thing. Religion tends to provide people with a strong moral foundation - when people follow religious teachings about controlling one’s own excesses, they are generally doing things that make them less of an asshole. Most every religion has its version of “thou shalt not kill”, and “thou shalt not steal”, for example. We need civil versions of those rules because, well, they’re good ideas, regardless of whether or not we learned them at church.
However, some religions, including Christianity, have ideas that if put into practice would allow us to impinge on the freedom of others. For example, slavery is condoned in the Bible - explicitly in the old testament and tacitly in the New Testament. No one today would suggest that we should allow the buying and selling of slaves, but during the antebellum debate over slavery, many quoted the Bible to support their positions in favor of the buying and selling of human beings. When slavery finally ended in America, it was not because some new theological interpretation changed the meaning of these quotes, it was because the thirteenth amendment to the constitution made slavery illegal, regardless of what the Bible might say. When your expression of your religious belief that you can have a slave collides with someone else’s fundamental right to not be enslaved, your beliefs lose.
Just over forty-eight years ago, another case involving marriage reached the Supreme Court. Richard and Mildred Loving were arrested and charged with a felony by the Commonwealth of Virginia for simply living in the state after being married in Washington, DC. What made their marriage illegal? The fact that Richard was white and Mildred was black. Leon M. Bazile, the judge in their trial, cited a religious argument for anti-miscegenation laws:
“Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”
It’s doesn’t rhyme as well as the argument against same-sex marriage:
“God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.”
But it’s more or less the same idea. And in Loving, the court held that anti-miscegenation laws ran afoul of the fourteenth amendment, specifically the due process clause. The due process clause of the fourteenth amendment states:
“[N]or shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law . . . .”
“Liberty” is a fairly broadly defined concept, extending to the full range of conduct which individuals are free to pursue, and which cannot be restricted by the government without a legitimate purpose. This includes the right to marry. The court held that the right to marry is a fundamental right, which meant that the “strict scrutiny” test is applied to see if the government has a “compelling government interest” in regulating it. In this case, a unanimous court could not find a compelling government interest in limiting marriage to couples of the same race. The court’s decision in Obergefell uses similar logic. Certainly, the Bible (at the very least, the Old Testament) forbids same-sex marriage. But the Bible doesn’t carry the force of law in the United States. The court held that statutes and constitutional provisions banning same-sex marriage at the state level failed the strict scrutiny test.
(As an aside, another example of a case where the strict scrutiny test would be applied would be in restricting access to unapproved drugs. Courts have held that you have a fundamental right to determine what you put in your own body, but that there is also a compelling government interest in keeping drugs that have not been proven safe and effective off the market, so the government is allowed to infringe your right in this case.)
So the government can’t limit the institution of marriage to heterosexual couples. What does this mean for you? Well, on a practical matter, it probably means that you’re going to see a slight uptick in the number of weddings you’re invited to. People who you’ve known all your life will be more comfortable sharing their lives and loves with the community now that they feel more like equal citizens rather than second-class pariahs. If you have an establishment that’s open to the public, you won’t have much of a leg to stand on when it comes to denying people service based on their sexual orientation. Yes, this means that Memories Pizza might have to bake a half dozen large pepperonis for a hypothetical pizza-catered gay wedding. Well, it would, if that were ever actually going to happen. It doesn’t mean, however, that your church will be forced to solemnize gay weddings, or that you will have to like the idea of gay marriage, any more than the passage of the thirteenth amendment meant that churches could no longer advocate for slavery on a biblical basis, or that slaveholders had to like the idea of giving up their slaves and paying people a wage to work their plantations.
It just means that you have to live with it.
And to be honest, it won’t be that hard. Same-sex marriage was already legal in some form in 23-26 countries around the world, depending on how you count, for nearly fifteen years in some cases. I recently visited the Netherlands, the first country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage, and I assure you that neither same-sex marriage nor the tolerated consumption of soft drugs has prevented straight couples from pairing off and raising families or from worshipping or not worshipping in whatever way they see fit. Here in the US, same-sex couples have been living together as family units, raising children and caring for elderly parents, exactly the same as mixed-gender couples, they just haven’t had the ability to have those families recognized by the government, as was (and is) their fundamental right. Recognizing these people’s rights and letting them exercise those rights is not a desecration, it is a beautiful example of our country living by its founding principles. I hope you come to accept that, and that ultimately you see it as a good thing.
Sincerely,
Verlin Henderson
