K-Lo gets an email:
Your article about marriage struck a chord with me, mainly when you wrote about the brutal tactics employed against defenders of traditional marriage. I'm 26 years old and my generation holds very strong views on this topic... in my experience, mostly in support of same-sex marriage. Personally, I'm on the fence about it. But for most people my age, that is not good enough. The peer pressure to support gay marriage is enormous. Which is precisely why I refuse to give my (socially mandatory in many circles) full-throated support to it. When friends tell me it's a civil right and denying gays their "universal right to marriage" is the same as forbidding whites and blacks to marry, it makes my skin crawl . . . but I don't know how to argue against these points. I just know deep down there's something fishy about the arguments.
In K-Lo's piece, Robert P. George continues his argument that those of us who want to be full members of our own families and societies are working for "the abolition of the conjugal conception of marriage as the union of husband and wife." This is untrue. I completely support the conjugal conception of marriage as the union of husband and wife. I cherish marriage as an institution between husband and wife. It remains a bedrock of society, critical to rearing children, central to teaching mutual responsibility and a miraculous place for the creation of new life. You can pore through every word I have ever written (and they have) to find a scintilla of hostility to this.
And when my own mum and dad were there at my wedding, and my husband's mum and dad were there at my wedding, they did not even begin to see how our marriage invalidated, let alone abolished, theirs'. In some ways, our marriage completed theirs'. We are their sons. They want us to be happy. They are thrilled we found each other. And this civil rite knitted us together in a way nothing else could.
Yes, it was painful not to marry in church. But we had mass the day before together. When I look back on that day, and the weddings of so many others, all I can see in George and Lopez is a simple blank refusal to accept our existence and our dignity, an inability to see that expanding marriage to include everyone does not destroy it - it just brings in those previously left outside.
These are the blinders of abstraction and fear; they need to be dropped to see the reality and the love. One day, they will. And that I just know.