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Stefanie Pettit: Gay marriage ruling doesn’t fix everything, but it’s something

I am the mother of a gay son.

When I watched coverage last Friday of the Supreme Court’s decision affirming marriage equality as the law of the land in all 50 states, I felt sad initially. Not sad at the decision, of course, but sad that my son Sam’s right of access to full citizenship had to be determined by a Supreme Court ruling.

Growing up I didn’t give marriage much thought, other than to think that I probably would get married someday. I took it for granted; it was my right. Until last Friday, it was never my son’s right. That broke my heart.

As I write these words, the decision is a day old. Already there are expressions of fear that the ruling greatly imperils Christianity and attacks religious freedom. Some of the words are pretty outrageous, and I fear a national, organized workaround strategy is in the offing. I don’t really understand how equality for one group imperils another, but I do understand and expect that there will be some overreaction at first. That’s how things go, but I hope as we settle into the new reality, that everyone finds a way to make peace with it and that we strive to be kind to one another.

We need a little perspective, which brings me back to religious matters.

Most, but not all, of the objection casts same-sex marriage as against God’s law. I have no problem if your personal views about homosexuality are Bible-based, but I do have a problem if you require your religious doctrine to be the basis for how laws for society as a whole should be written. Certainly let the Bible be a good guide for how you live your life, but it is neither legal nor appropriate for its edicts to rule a land where there is freedom of religion and freedom from religion. Otherwise, welcome to a First World version of Sharia law.

I think we need to realize just how much cherry-picking there is in how we apply the Bible to legislation. Many things are listed as abominations in the Bible yet are fairly comfortably legal in society – lying, marrying across religious lines, love of money and more. The Bible also condemns tattoos and eating pork and requires circumcision of men.

True, most of these biblical rules come from the Old Testament, and there is sincere disagreement about whether adherence to Mosaic law is required of Christians. Even so, of all the proscriptions in the Bible, I have long been fascinated by Christendom’s almost singular focus on homosexuality, about which Jesus said nothing (though I’m pretty confident he didn’t endorse it).

This obsession with homosexuality brings to mind something that happened several years ago when a friend, a devout Christian, wrote a story in a newsletter in which he urged boycotting a particular company because it offered benefits to same-sex partners. I challenged him on that and asked why he was so militant about homosexuality when the Bible expresses another condemnation that is way more prevalent in society and probably has a greater impact on families – divorce.

And it’s not just an Old Testament thing; both books of the Bible are quite clear in forbidding divorce. The only exception is if the wife is having sex outside the marriage. Any other divorce or remarriage constitutes adultery.

So if you take the Bible as a literal doctrine, your divorce may be valid in the eyes of the law, but it is not so in the eyes of God. Yet most people I know who cite the Bible in objecting to gay rights are mute when it comes to biblical condemnation of divorce.

For business people who don’t want to provide services (florists, caterers, photographers, etc.) to customers who they believe are acting in defiance of God’s laws, I suggest they are already doing so, whether they realize it or not.

To my friend’s credit, he conceded that Christians are inconsistent in speaking against divorce because it strikes too close to home. Indeed, research from Baylor University last year showed that evangelical Christians divorce at greater-than-average rates. I suggested that there are probably more gay people in his church than he realizes because they remain (or at least did so 20 years ago) closeted. So homosexuality is closer to home than he thinks.

Think about it, if the same level of religious fervor about homosexuality were applied to the Bible’s condemnation of divorce, then we would be writing laws that divorced persons could not marry, adopt children, hold certain positions or that they could be blocked in various ways from full participation in society. Ridiculous. Yet such has been the reality for gays and lesbians.

Until last Friday. The Supreme Court’s ruling doesn’t fix everything. It doesn’t change people’s hearts or undo centuries of pain and persecution. But it is something, a big something. And I am happy for it, for Sam and for everyone who has a Sam in his or her life.

Sam and I talked Friday morning, a quiet conversation in which he confided that his reaction was kind of muted. It felt to him like a “duh” moment, not a “ta-da!” one. He and I are alike in that we tend to underreact to things, to take them in and think about them and then come forward later after we’ve processed it all.

We’re waiting and watching. We are thankful. And we’re hopeful.

Voices correspondent Stefanie Pettit can be reached by email at upwindsailor@comcast.net. Previous columns are available at spokesman.com/columnists.