Does Opposing Same-Sex Marriage Risk Violating the Constitution's Establishment Clause?

Yesterday, Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern wrote a piece that mainly disagrees with my (orthodox Christian) belief that homosexual sex is morally wrong — as is all sexual intercourse outside of marriage. I’m shocked — shocked — that a liberal writer on LGBT issues would take issue with my rather conventional Christian world view. What I did find interesting, however, was this statement:

His thesis is that homosexuality is like abortion: an evil to be combatted, anathema to basic Christian values. Gay marriage is wrong, he suggests, because gay sex is wrong—an immoral choice, not an aspect of an immutable identity. Gay people could choose to remain celibate. Instead, they choose to have sex—and demand that society and the state honor that choice by affording their relationships equal dignity. French hopes to rouse the shrinking subset of Americans who still think gay sex is nothing more than sinful debauchery.

The problem with this gambit is that it only works within deeply intolerant pockets of conservative Christianity. In his pieces, French often speaks of a “truth” that gay rights violate. Dig deep enough, and you’ll find that this truth is the Gospel, as interpreted in a strictly anti-gay manner. For evangelical Christians like French, that’s a fine truth to live by. But French does not (and cannot) explain why his own truth should be codified into law in a country whose constitution separates church from state.

First — as a general matter – making a moral argument — both to fellow Christians and to people seeking to understand the Christian perspective — is not the same thing as making a legal argument. In a pluralistic society, there is space for both Stern’s moral point of view and the Christian perspective, with fault lines emerging mainly when government attempts to silence opposing views or — even worse — coerce participation in morally objectionable acts. On campus, for example, I believe there’s room for LGBT groups and orthodox Christian groups — but campus leftists often disagree.

Next, in the controversy over same-sex marriage (where both moral and legal arguments were unavoidable), the question before the Supreme Court wasn’t whether the Constitution protected the right of gay people to get married — no state in the union prohibited a gay person from getting married, and gay people have been marrying spouses of the opposite sex for millennia – but instead whether the Constitution required the state to change the definition of marriage to encompass same-sex unions. One need not make a Bible-based moral argument to assert that the text and history of the Constitution render such a notion absurd.

Finally, however, since argument for changing the definition of marriage wasn’t grounded in the text and history of the Constitution but rather in Justice Kennedy’s (and gay rights activists’ — but I’m being redundant) morally subjective notions of “dignity,” it would be odd indeed if one moral point of view could be fully aired and adopted by the highest authorities in the land while a contrary moral point of view — whether grounded in citizens’ religious beliefs, natural law, or comparable moral code — would be deemed to violate the Establishment Clause. There are many liberal Christians who enthusiastically cheered Kennedy and found his reasoning entirely consistent with their progressive religious orthodoxies.

When moral arguments matter — in law or in culture — both sides may make them with equal force. Moreover, you will find religious people on all sides of a debate. Simply because my views are orthodox — consistent with 2,000 years of church tradition — while the Episcopal Church’s views are consistent only with the last dozen or so years of progressive intellectual fashion does not mean that biblical religious truth implicates the Establishment Clause while progressive religious beliefs do not. Religious people have been advocating policy changes for religious reasons since the founding of our nation. Did John Kasich violate the Establishment Clause when he expanded Medicaid? Do gun control efforts impermissibly combine church and state? The question isn’t whether faith motivated the voter or politician but rather whether the law violates specific, legally-protected rights. Any other formulation leads to absurd results.

I had to file a sexual harassment suit against a transgender / mentally ill man who was harassing me at work.
It asked me to go on girls’ only lunches, which I refused, drinks, which I refused. It followed me to lunch in the cafeteria, seeking acceptance and validation that I didn’t want to give. I finally told it, I can’t tell you what you can’t do, but my brother would be recommended counseling if he decided he was my sister.
It would lecture me on not dressing femininely, on my gestures and body language, my not bothering to wear makeup most days. With a full time job and 2 preschoolers at the time, I considered it an accomplishment to simply be there are do my job. I had to share the bathroom with it, while it admitted it was still attracted to women.
I couldn’t avoid it per se, because it was a system administrator while I was the only woman working on the help desk. I started using different bathrooms in the building to preserve my privacy.
It confronted me in my cube one day, demanding to know what made me more of a woman than it, since chromosomes don’t matter and it was more feminine than me. I replied, “I gave birth twice.”
It proceeded to interfere with my work, such as giving my escalated tickets lowest priority, while giving graphic details of the sex change surgery and all the effort it went through to become a woman. I spoke with HR, two managers, no avail. They told me to deal with it, why not have lunch with it, could I avoid it? The manager who told me to have a coming to Jesus meeting between the girls several times was frustrating to say the least. I didn’t have to be its friend, but when users are calling me on server problems it won’t fix until the end of the day, dinging my stats, customers suffer for the petty cattiness. My boss only talked to it when we had a PDM system outage, it wouldn’t restart the services, told me to do it myself, I asked what the right procedure was, then followed procedure right, rebooting the wrong server. Instead of one system down, they got calls on two, and I was reamed despite saying that I tried getting the admin’s advice and followed admin’s instructions.
Finally filed the sexual harassment claim through ethics office when it came in while I had lunch in my cube and proceeded to talk for 20 minutes about neo-vagina construction. That, ethics and HR agreed, was out of line. Then they talked to it, and roles and responsibilities were shifted.

Transgenders are mentally ill, and they seek validation of that mental illness from women in every possible way, to extremes women wouldn’t tolerate from other women.

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