But I wonder if this is an example of how gay marriage opponents are going to end up losing this battle entirely when they could have won at least a partial victory if they'd been less strident in their opposition. If they had actively supported civil unions, that might have become the de facto standard across the country, accepted by courts and legislatures alike. But the ferocity of their opposition to any form of marriage equality might have been instrumental in convincing a lot of people like Baldacci that half measures are impossible. And if half measures are impossible, then full marriage rights are the only alternative.
I tend to think that there's some truth to this, but it's incomplete. After all, both Maine and Vermont had civil union laws--both just recently got upgraded to civil marriage. Gay rights opponents obviously didn't have a good strategy here, but there is another option: that civil unions didn't really go far enough in addressing what is at the heart of everything involving gay rights: whether gay love is substantively any different from straight love. I, of course, do not believe there is any significant difference, which is why I support full marriage equality, and have since around early 2006. Before that I supported civil unions, but after a point I realized that creating similar but different institutions to celebrate gay and straight love was the inevitable consequence of a belief that the two are different. Intellectually, that approach--while commanding of supermajority support--just didn't answer the question well enough. By the way, it doesn't really make sense that every question surrounding gays and lesbians be governed by the "Is homosexuality okay?" question. For things like nondiscrimination laws, fair housing, etc., it seems common sense to choose to coexist no matter what one believes.
Now, being a Christian complicates things a bit for me personally, though of course not as a matter of civil law. I'm a near-absolutist when it comes to church-state separation. This being said, there are some troubling verses in the Bible about having sexual relations with other men, and I know that some argue that such verses were more about sacrificial practices of the time. It's an entirely plausible argument. But my belief is that, ultimately, my view of Jesus is not that of a man who would turn away people just because they were different. Christians pretty much ignore the Hebrew Commandments, which I think is reasonable, considering we're not the ancient Israelites. I have little respect for Christians who insist on saying, "Well, you can't pick and choose what parts of the Bible to follow," while not wearing a linen sheet as their sole garment. Everyone picks and chooses, and following Old Testament laws has naught to do with Christianity, as the Apostle Paul said. But for God to create such a large group of people who are like this--to create such large groups of so many animals like this--suggests to me that the letter of the law, which is incomplete anyway, isn't the final word on the subject, unless one believes that eating lobster is equally as immoral as gay sex, as one would have to according to the Old Testament. I realize that the point here isn't that we're supposed to merely emulate nature. But it just shows, for me, that being gay is no more a choice than being white or black, and no more or less sinful. And to feel the kind of love that gay men and lesbians I've known have felt does truly require the presence of God, for God is love.
This is my thought process, anyway. I approach it not from the arrogance of believing I know how the world works, but out of humility and out of a respect for others and a belief that one ought to approach these kinds of things in a free society from the perspective of maximizing freedom. It comes, in other words, from my liberalism.
