aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Wednesday, March 30, 2005

The conservative case for gay marriage

I’m engaged in a wonderful dialogue with a conservative colleague on campus. It began when he, a professor of political science, posited post election that a new moral majority was rising up. I go back and forth on that, sometimes I buy it other times I don’t.

He’s just back from Europe and has sent me a bunch of articles on the gay marriage issue there, including this from CBS:

Three years after Amsterdam’s mayor officiated at the Netherlands’ first gay wedding, the gay marriage rate is falling, the first divorces are being registered and the issue has disappeared from the political agenda.

While the United States is engaged in debate on a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, Canadians are discussing a federal law to legalize it and many European countries are adopting civil unions for gay couples.

But in the Netherlands, nobody talks about the issue anymore. 

My colleague’s a conservative Catholic. I’ve never asked what his views are on gay marriage. What I appreciate is the dialogue. I try to avoid strident, inflammatory rhetoric here (where I live and on this blog), even as I take clearly liberal positions.

I could consider myself a moderate in the current climate. But I think it’s important that those of us not at the edges stake our claim to be liberal or conservative; not let the extremes define us away and turn liberal and conservative into something they need not be.

I appreciate my conservative readers (Basil, where are you?) and try to read views other than my own, to put myself in the other side’s shoes. At the very least, appreciate that thoughtful people can come to different conclusions.

This post has lost its focus! Back to the topic! I’ll end with this classic I always love to point to, the conservative case for gay marriage.