'The Bible tells me so' doesn't cut it in public [Gay marriage]

I am an American atheist. I believe in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. I do not believe in gods or in revealed texts. My belief in the tools of democracy is relevant on the public square. My disbelief in gods is not.

On Nov. 7, the Family Research Institute of Wisconsin, whose mission is to "forward Judeo-Christian principles and traditional values in Wisconsin," won a victory for the organization's interpretation of the Bible with the passing of the amendment to ban gay marriages and civil unions.

According to a Sept. 23 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article, the institute claimed that the amendment had the support of 5,000 churches and 2 million congregants. Fair Wisconsin, the group leading the fight against the amendment, claimed that resolutions opposing the amendment had been passed by organizations representing 500,000 congregants.

On Oct. 19, a forum was held in Madison to debate the state's Nov. 7 advisory referendum on establishing the death penalty for first-degree murder cases backed by DNA evidence. The Rev. Mike Mayhak of Faith Baptist Church quoted Genesis and Romans in support of the death penalty. Bishop Robert Morlino of the Diocese of Madison relied on the pope's interpretation of the Bible to oppose the death penalty.

While acknowledging that there were people of different faiths on either side of these issues, I can only assume there was a preponderance of Christians. So to them I ask: Are you guys reading the same Bible? And if you are, where is its ultimate authority if such diametrically opposed opinions can be buttressed by the same text?

This is not a rational debate. It is a Bible-quoting arms race, each side cherry-picking its way through a religious document that was arbitrarily cobbled together over several centuries from many writers and diverse cultural milieus. Whoever ends up with the most fruit expects to win the day. The trouble is many of the cherries in the Bible are just plain rotten.

In the early 19th century, abolitionists held the moral high ground by any objective, rational, nonbiblical backward glance. However, Southern slave owners and their representatives in Congress won the theological argument hands down. As the Rev. Richard Fuller said in 1845, "What God sanctioned in the Old Testament, and permitted in the New, cannot be a sin."

Slavery, as we now know, was a sin and a national disgrace, even if the Bible didn't tell us so.

Have we learned anything in the intervening 160 years about Scripture and policy? Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey once said, "The Bible is very clear on this (homosexuality). ... I abide by the instructions that are given to me in the Bible."

One can only speculate if Armey's understanding of Scripture was informed by the Rev. Ted Haggard's weekly televised pulpit pontifications.

Will it take our country another 160 years to know that discriminating against a group of people because of their sexual orientation is a sin and a national disgrace, regardless of what the Bible tells us? My point is that the Bible, or any religious text, has no authority on the public square in a secular society whose guiding authority rests in the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Our democracy is based on a rational defense of the civil rights, civil liberties and economic welfare of its citizens, not on the ambiguous and often contradicting approbations and proscriptions of religious texts. Democracy cannot serve two masters.

This is not to say that an individual's political stance cannot be informed by his or her religious belief. It would be absurd to claim otherwise. But as a political argument, religious belief should go no further than the church door or your own pocket. On the public square, "because the Bible tells me so" just doesn't cut it ... or it shouldn't.

Robert Weitzel of Middleton writes frequently for newspapers, magazines and Web sites. E-mail: rweitz@tds.net Published: November 24, 2006

Your question, "Whose rights are being infringed by necrophilia?" rests on the underlying assumption that there is only one category of moral wrong, and that is violating another person's rights.

But this is not so. There are other, more basic ways for a human action to be wrong: one of them is to act in a way that degrades your dignity as a human being, or contributes to a like degradation of others.

Most of us have read dystopias where people have lost reason, conscience and purpose, and are reduced to being puppets, robots, or near-automata. Think of Huxley's Brave New World, or The Matix Part I or any number of other "Invasion-of-the-Pod-People" fantasies (I'm presuming you've read or seen at least something of this sort.)

These are examples of a grave moral wrong, even if the Huxleyesque loss of moral freedom and dignity were brought about without force or fraud, simply by seducing people through their weaknesses.

The only point I'm trying to make here, is that violating rights is not the only way to do wrong. It is also wrong to degrade human dignity.

Lesbianism is not as aggressively promiscuous, as epidemiologically reckless, or as microbiologically zooey as gay male sex; but it is also socially dysfunctional in that it fails to accomplish several of the crucial tasks of human sexuality: the creation of stable male-female alliance, the begetting of offspring, and the raising of children with durable adult male and female parental relationship.

It's a misuse of something (sex) that has a much more valuable function.

An example would be: say you took a classically crafted, priceless Stradivarius violin, broke it up into kindling and burned it in your wood stove. Fire is good, warmth is nice, the bright flames are cheery --- but burning a violin shows pathetic ignorance of what this elegant and splendid thing was made for; it's a crying shame; it's a poor use of a beautiful instrument.

It's worse than this, of course; and you can only begin to grasp the gravity of it if you realize that the good use of the "violin" --- good sex --- is the source of human survival, the family, society, and civilization.

That's an interesting perspective, TNdandelion. A look at the "natural" (even aside from the "supernatural") gives us plenty to think about.

Too many people seem to think that the state's concern with marriage is based only on supernatural (religious) grounds; and therefore if some religious (or non-religious) groups approve man/man or woman/woman unions, then the state is obliged to also, on the basis of non-religious-discrimination.

This is common argument, and a well-intended one; but it is not persuasive because it is mistaken about WHY the state recognizes marriage at all.

The state has no business presuming to “validate” the rites or ceremonies of any religion. I do not demand that the state must recognize my Baptism or legalize my Confirmation; similarly, if men or women want to join a monastic community, they do not expect the State of Tennessee to supervise their ceremony or enforce their vows.

The only reason why the state gets into the “marriage business,” is because it advances a distinctly secular purpose. Male/female is the only kind of sexual relation from which a new human being can spontaneously result. The state has a secular interest in recognizing and stabilizing this relation because the state defines the legal rights and responsibilities which arise from procreation.

Two homosexuals may want to secure co-responsibility for each others' medical care, finances, property, or joint child-raising; but each of these can be addressed by private contract. That's what powers of attorney, trust funds, adoption, and wills are for.

These are available now; and, of course, enforceable by law.

It does not follow that the state must recognize the ceremonies of one religion, or of all religions, as a matter of right. You can write a ceremony for two men (or three or four, for that matter), and you can rent a wedding chapel and have a fabulous party afterwards. But there's no secular, compelling reason to demand government intrusion in any of that.

It has nothing to do with the state's secular interest, which is to stabilize the one kind of intimate relation which can result in the begetting of children.

Atheists don't need to disprove the existence of God. The burden of proof is squarely on those who claim that God exists.

Ditto for those pushing the existence of UFOs, Santa Claus, or the Tooth Fairy.

MY DEAR WORMWOOD,
      I note what you say about guiding our patient's reading and taking care that he sees a good deal of his materialist friend. But are you not being a trifle naïf? It sounds as if you supposed that argument was the way to keep him out of the Enemy's clutches. That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier. At that time the humans still knew pretty well when a thing was proved and when it was not; and if it was proved they really believed it. They still connected thinking with doing and were prepared to alter their way of life as the result of a chain of reasoning. But what with the weekly press and other such weapons we have largely altered that. Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to have a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn't think of doctrines as primarily "true" of "false", but as "academic" or "practical", "outworn" or "contemporary", "conventional" or "ruthless". Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don't waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong, or stark, or courageous—that it is the philosophy of the future. That's the sort of thing he cares about.
      The trouble about argument is that it moves the whole struggle onto the Enemy's own ground. He can argue too; whereas in really practical propaganda of the kind I am suggesting He has been shown for centuries to be greatly the inferior of Our Father Below. By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient's reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result? Even if a particular train of thought can be twisted so as to end in our favour, you will find that you have been strengthening in your patient the fatal habit of attending to universal issues and withdrawing his attention from the stream of immediate sense experiences. Your business is to fix his attention on the stream. Teach him to call it "real life" and don't let him ask what he means by "real".
      Remember, he is not, like you, a pure spirit. Never having been a human (Oh that abominable advantage of the Enemy's!) you don't realise how enslaved they are to the pressure of the ordinary. I once had a patient, a sound atheist, who used to read in the British Museum. One day, as he sat reading, I saw a train of thought in his mind beginning to go the wrong way. The Enemy, of course, was at his elbow in a moment. Before I knew where I was I saw my twenty years' work beginning to totter. If I had lost my head and begun to attempt a defence by argument I should have been undone. But I was not such a fool. I struck instantly at the part of the man which I had best under my control and suggested that it was just about time he had some lunch. The Enemy presumably made the counter-suggestion (you know how one can never quite overhear What He says to them?) that this was more important than lunch. At least I think that must have been His line for when I said "Quite. In fact much too important to tackle it the end of a morning", the patient brightened up considerably; and by the time I had added "Much better come back after lunch and go into it with a fresh mind", he was already half way to the door. Once he was in the street the battle was won. I showed him a newsboy shouting the midday paper, and a No. 73 bus going past, and before he reached the bottom of the steps I had got into him an unalterable conviction that, whatever odd ideas might come into a man's head when he was shut up alone with his books, a healthy dose of "real life" (by which he meant the bus and the newsboy) was enough to show him that all "that sort of thing" just couldn't be true. He knew he'd had a narrow escape and in later years was fond of talking about "that inarticulate sense for actuality which is our ultimate safeguard against the aberrations of mere logic". He is now safe in Our Father's house.
      You begin to see the point? Thanks to processes which we set at work in them centuries ago, they find it all but impossible to believe in the unfamiliar while the familiar is before their eyes. Keep pressing home on him the ordinariness of things. Above all, do not attempt to use science (I mean, the real sciences) as a defence against Christianity. They will positively encourage him to think about realities he can't touch and see. There have been sad cases among the modern physicists. If he must dabble in science, keep him on economics and sociology; don't let him get away from that invaluable "real life". But the best of all is to let him read no science but to give him a grand general idea that he knows it all and that everything he happens to have picked up in casual talk and reading is "the results of modem investigation". Do remember you are there to fuddle him. From the way some of you young fiends talk, anyone would suppose it was our job to teach!

Your affectionate uncle
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