How I Evolved on Gay Marriage

After my Bloggingheads discussion on gay marriage and related matters with Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern, a student at a prominent Evangelical college wrote me asking for advice. She said her campus has been riven by the homosexuality debate and she’s found herself challenged to address it in a faithful, thoughtful manner. In lieu of advice, I wrote to her about  my own experience as an undergraduate at a time when the campus consensus was all but defined by the issue. It was a moment when everyone was supposed to evolve—and I did—just not in the way everyone wanted me to.

Dear M—,

When I arrived at college in the fall of 2004, the issues I had to reckon with as a young Christian (I’d been raised in an Evangelical household) were ones playing out in my own reading—evolution, the reliability of scripture, tradition. They were pressing, but I could think through them in private. No one was asking, “Where do you stand?”

But the gay marriage debate was on the horizon (it had probably arrived elsewhere, but Princeton can manage only a leisurely, ambling pursuit of progress). Unlike many Christians with similar upbringings, coming around to approving gay unions as marriages or gay sex as sinless never seemed a possibility to me. I wasn’t going to change my view, but I lacked the resources to defend it. I spent a year pulling all-nighters and going out, but I was still thinking. Something had to give.

I somehow came across Elizabeth Anscombe’s essay Contraception and Chastity. She offered a challenge to me. How could I reject homosexual sex when I didn’t reject contraception?

If contraceptive intercourse is permissible, then what objection could there be after all to mutual masturbation, or copulation in vase in debito, sodomy, buggery (I should perhaps remark that I am using a legal term here—not indulging in bad language), when normal copulation is impossible or inadvisable (or in any case, according to taste)? It can’t be the mere pattern of bodily behaviour in which the stimulation is procured that makes all the difference! But if such things are all right, it becomes perfectly impossible to see anything wrong with homosexual intercourse, for example. I am not saying: if you think contraception all right you will do these other things; not at all. The habit of respectability persists and old prejudices die hard. But I am saying: you will have no solid reason against these things. You will have no answer to someone who proclaims as many do that they are good too. You cannot point to the known fact that Christianity drew people out of the pagan world, always saying no to these things. Because, if you are defending contraception, you will have rejected Christian tradition.

Not all Christians who encounter Anscombe’s argument are persuaded by it, but I was. My conviction on the narrow question of homosexuality was strengthened by being situated in a more comprehensive, coherent view of Christian sexual ethics than I’d had before. (Note that despite Anscombe’s high-proof language, she’s arguing against singling out gay sex for special opprobrium.)

By the time of my 2008 graduation, Prop 8 was in the news and gay marriage was the defining in-group issue for college students. I remember getting an email from a friend who had come out. He expressed confusion, anger, and more than a little self-righteousness at my persistence in my backward views. I replied to him forthrightly, telling him how much I loved him, how grateful I was for the times he’d let me cry on his shoulder, and challenging him on whether he really believed everyone who thought as I did was a bigot. He never wrote back. I felt isolated, defensive, and I still regret how I wrongly blamed someone we both were close to for not sticking up for me in the way I wanted. I was tired of apologizing for my views without support from anyone in my circle. The problem solved itself: My circle shrank.

And my reading broadened. One source I turned to for intellectual friendship was Don Colacho, a Colombian aphorist who’s helped me think historically about our current moment. The merits of the argument for gay marriage, such as they are, are obscured by the movement’s immense rhetorical shallowness. Advocates seem to think that progress is inevitable, that history only turns one way. But accusing someone of being on the wrong side of history says nothing about whether he is on the right side of the argument. It is a mere threat, and a somewhat hollow one, for history is an arbitrary enforcer. 

The only way I know to avoid the same kind of shallowness is to cultivate friendship wherever it can be found: with friends who agree or disagree, with books new or old, and finally (this I know the least about myself) with Christ. A strange portion of the intellectual discovery and growth in friendship I’ve enjoyed these past years has come about not despite but because of the vexations of the gay marriage debate. It’s pushed me to think harder and to speak more honestly. I’ve had to ask what I owe to principle and what I owe my friends—perennial questions.

So my main advice is: stay honest, and take heart. Have courage to do what’s right. Try to remember always, always to have a good time.

Faithfully,

Matthew

I’d welcome other notes—from people who reached the same conclusion, a different one, or don’t expect ever to reach any conclusion at all—at [email protected].