Gay Marriage and Religious Freedom

Miles Kimball of the University of Michigan argues that supporting gay marriage is support for religious freedom. After all, most of the opposition to gay marriage is religious, and in America we aren’t permitted to impose our religion on other people. Besides, Kimball says, gay marriage is an avenue for spiritual development for the gays who are married, and it is unconstitutional to close off that path of advance to people just because of their sexual preferences.

Kimball affirms that Americans have the freedom to believe that gay marriage is ungodly. But gay marriage can be restricted or prohibited only on the basis of non-sectarian beliefs that are acknowledged by the majority of the American people.

Given the direction of jurisprudence in the past half-century, Kimball is surely correct regarding the law.

If laws against abortion cannot be based on religious argument, laws concerning marriage cannot either. Marriage is one of the remaining bastions of Christendom: Why should it be permitted to stand?

Kimball seems a reasonable fellow. He wants only to live and let live. What Kimball doesn’t seem to recognize is that gay marriage, like every secularization of law, institutionalizes not marriage freedom but the imposition of a non-traditional form of marriage. The law cannot remain religiously neutral.

It’s further evidence that people who oppose gay marriage need to be prepared to be branded “unAmerican.”