The Masterpiece Cakeshop case was decided by the Supreme Court last summer in favor of the baker who refused to make a wedding cake for a same-sex marriage, but it was a narrow ruling that set little or no precedent. It remains an open question how far “My religion demands that I not serve your kind” can go.

Before that case was decided, a Christian blogger wanted to demonstrate the hypocrisy of gay couples asking Christian bakers for wedding cakes. So it’s not okay for Christian bakers to refuse? Let’s see how gay bakers like it when the tables are turned!

The Freedom Outpost blogger asked thirteen gay or pro-gay bakers for a cake that said, “Gay Marriage is Wrong.” Each baker turned him down.

If anyone who objects [says] our request for the cake was hateful, this is exactly the type of thing the homosexual activists do to Christian bakeries when they use the state to coerce them to make a cake with an explicitly pro homosexual slogan on it. Well, to turn it against them, we asked for an explicitly anti-homosexual marriage cake.

Blatant hypocrisy, right?

This inept experiment fails since the two positions aren’t symmetrical. The gay couple in the 2012 Colorado case simply wanted a wedding cake, not an anti-Christian or anti-conservative statement or even a political statement of any kind. It’s just a wedding cake—a symbol of love, remember? If someone is determined to take offense at that or see the wedding not as a loving couple wanting to get married but a deliberate poke in the eye of their lord and savior . . . well, I guess there’s not much you can do about that. But an objective observer would not see the imagined crime.

(Going forward, I’ll sometimes use conservative/liberal as synonyms for the clumsier phrases “same-sex marriage opponent/proponent.” This may bring to mind politics, but that’s fine since politics seems to be at least as much of a driving force as Christianity.)

The “Gay Marriage is Wrong” cake was just hate speech. You’re welcome to say that, but you’re not entitled to demand someone else to do so. You want a symmetric experiment? Ask a gay baker to bake a wedding cake for a straight couple with the familiar bride/groom cake topper. If the baker demands that you take your business elsewhere because they don’t serve “your kind,” then you’ve got a case.

I’m sure that Freedom Outpost knew that that request wouldn’t cause any sparks, which is why they didn’t try an honest symmetric experiment but opted instead for a groundless grandstanding opportunity.

Tom Gilson of the Thinking Christian blog supported this experiment:

Every gay marriage wedding cake, no matter how it’s decorated, says the man-woman-only view of marriage is wrong; but it takes special effort to make a man and woman’s wedding cake communicate that gay marriage is wrong.

First, the cake does have a point to make, but “the man/woman-only view is wrong” is not it. How hateful do you have to be to take a couple’s celebration of their special day and insist that the purpose is actually just to be mean to you?

If you enjoy being cantankerous, you could see the same kind of message in a man/woman wedding cake. Is this cake a deliberate jab at the couples who couldn’t afford a wedding this nice? Or the couples who only bought a small cake because they don’t have as many friends? Or the people whose potential mate turned them down?

Who would imagine any of those messages as subtext in a wedding cake? Who would think that that is a primary message of the wedding? If you’re thin-skinned, see this as a winner-take-all political game, and are determined to be offended, then you might see every gay wedding cake as a personal affront, but that’s your problem.

Onto the second point, that it’s hard to make the statement “gay marriage is wrong” with an ordinary wedding cake. That’s right, and that’s why the experiment was irredeemably flawed. A symmetric cake doesn’t actually make an objectively offensive message.

Is it always politics?

There’s an obvious lesson here—that a truly symmetric cake would actually send a loving message, so the objection to anti-discrimination laws was motivated by politics rather than logic—but that’s not where Thinking Christian wants to go with this. The post takes the conservative, anti-same-sex marriage position as a given and explores the argument from a strategic standpoint. How can conservatives make their message more palatable?

He summarizes the two positions this way:

Natural marriage proponents are defending an institution and standing in the way of gay couples’ desire to marry. [They] seek to disrupt two real people’s desires, hopes, and felt needs.

Same-sex “marriage” proponents are attacking an institution and defending couples’ desires to marry. [They] seek to disrupt the historic institution of marriage.

(It’s fun how he adds scare quotes to same-sex “marriage.” My position has been insulted even before he gets started!)

There’s a big difference between attacking marriage and seeking to expand it. And I presume by “disrupt the historic institution of marriage,” this is a claim that marriage is unchanging. It’s not and has been dramatically changed just in my own lifetime (more on that later).

I do understand his predicament as he lays it out. He must be the hard-ass, burdened with the unpalatable message. He’s attacking real people, while his opponents are attacking an institution. (That’s how he sees it, anyway. In fact it’s even more difficult since his opponents are attacking just one calcified interpretation of the institution. Making the institution of marriage open to more people has historically been on the right side of history.)

Then we get the predictable, tired arguments in favor of the conservative position: marriage is important for children (actually, healthy families are important to children), same-sex marriage is morally wrong (you’re free to avoid same-sex marriage if you don’t like it, but you’re not free to put your supernatural conclusions into laws), and so on.

And I must respond to his use of the phrase “natural marriage.” Marriage is not natural; it’s a manmade institution, and it can be defined any way that society decides. What he’s confusing with marriage is sex. Sex is natural, and marriage is not. Marriage wasn’t even a Christian sacrament until 1215.

Gilson wrings his hand at his difficulty.

Gay “marriage” doesn’t have to be right to win rhetorically. . . .

We ask gay bakers to make cakes for us that express our position, just as gays have asked some of us to [bake] cakes that express their position. Their request comes across as rhetorically natural, ours is clumsy and awkward.

You’re determined to miss the point. No, your request comes across not as awkward but as hateful because your game is not symmetric. This ridiculous demand to make a “Gay Marriage is Wrong” cake is as relevant to the issue as demanding a Ku Klux Klan cake. Neither is the symmetric version of a cake for a gay wedding.

Continue to part 2 for a critique of six steps the author recommends to help conservatives strengthen their rhetorical position.

Related post: 20 Arguments Against Same-Sex Marriage, Rebutted

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 1/26/15.)

Image credit: Arallyn!, flickr, CC

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This is the concluding post looking at popular arguments against same-sex marriage. Conservative radio host Frank Turek provides most of them. (Part 1 here.)

17. Christians are obliged to reject same-sex marriage!

Frank gives society some tough love:

If we celebrate harmful behavior we are being unloving. Love requires we tell people the truth, even if it upsets them.

We’ve already established that homosexuality is no more inherently harmful than heterosexuality (see argument 15). Franks “harm” is simply a caution against unsafe sex.

You can imagine that God creates homosexuals and then somehow is disgusted by his own creation, but it’s curious how God’s views seem to line up so conveniently well with your own—so conveniently that I wonder if you’re playing “God” like a sock puppet.

First show that your severe god and his supernatural world exists. Only then will worrying about his desires make sense. Until then, I have no respect for your fantasy.

18. Society will collapse!

Frank considers same-sex marriage in society and doesn’t like the orgy that he expects it to cause within the straight community.

Legally equating [straight and same-sex] relationships breaks the link between marriage and childbearing which leads to higher illegitimacy and a chain of negative effects that fall like dominoes—illegitimacy leads to poverty, crime, and higher welfare costs which lead to bigger government, higher taxes, and a slower economy.

So same-sex marriage lets slip that it’s actually sex that produces babies, not marriage? That’s already obvious to anyone who’s been paying attention. Frank concludes that this insight will cause straight people to have more sex outside of marriage, and that will produce more illegitimate children, but how does that follow?

Ignoring the incoherence of the orgy argument, it sounds like he’s confusing illegitimate children with unwanted children. Illegitimacy can simply be redefined. If illegitimacy causes problems, encourage society to define the problem away. As for unwanted children, I get it—that is indeed a problem. For that, I urge Frank to stop making abortion more difficult (more here).

19. There is no genetic basis for homosexual desire!

Frank gives us the benefit of his years of research into the biology of homosexuality.

After many years of intense research, a genetic component to homosexual desires has not been discovered. Twin studies show that identical twins do not consistently have the same sexual orientation. In fact, genetics probably explains very little about homosexual desires.

That may be right, but so what? We could wrestle with why someone is homosexual (one source: “Scientists hypothesize that a combination of genetic, hormonal, and social factors determine sexual orientation”) but that’s off topic. Frank wrongly implies from this incompletely answered question that no one is homosexual. I wonder if he’ll next tell us that, since he isn’t left handed, left handedness doesn’t exist.

Though conversion therapy (the conversion of someone from a homosexual into a heterosexual) still exists, its reputation is poor today, and it is illegal in some states. If people call themselves ex-gay and are satisfied with that self-image, that’s fine. Sexual identity is a spectrum, and a bisexual person might see themselves as gay one year and ex-gay the next. Just don’t conclude that homosexuality is bad, that it should be suppressed, or that no one is homosexual.

Exodus International was a Christian ministry devoted to conversion therapy. It operated for almost 40 years before disbanding in 2013. Its president admitted that their work had changed almost no one.

20. But same-sex marriage is unnatural. Just think about it. . . yuck!

[Marriages of this type are] alliances so unnatural that God and nature seem to forbid them.

Hold on. No, that’s my bad. This is actually from an 1878 Virginia Supreme Court decision, and the marriages that so bothered the judges in this case were mixed-race marriages.

But this is basically identical to what modern opponents to same-sex marriage say. Here is the 2003 view of Anglican archbishop of Nigeria Peter Akinola:

I cannot think of how a man in his right senses would be having sexual relations with another man. It is so unnatural, so unscriptural.

First off, homosexuality is natural. It has been documented in 1500 species of animals, including all great apes (of which humans are a part).

Second, if it freaks you out to think about two guys doing it, then don’t think about it. There are straight couples that do the same thing, and quite possibly in larger numbers—does that bother you?

You think gay sex is yucky? What’s yucky is the Christian as imaginary voyeur, peeking through the window into someone’s bedroom to criticize what they’re doing.

Third, let’s not put that much stock in whether something is supported by scripture or not. Slavery, polygamy, and genocide have clear support in scripture. Christians happily condemn those practices today, so the Bible obviously no longer binds us.

Fourth, the Bible says nothing about same-sex marriage. Even the widely cited verses arguing that homosexuality is wrong make a weak case.

Fifth, marriage was invented by humans. It’s changed in important ways in my own lifetime (see argument #3), and the legality of same-sex marriage is just one more change.

Finally, consider IVF, abortions, surrogate mothers, and modern technology that saves the lives of premature infants. Add to that erectile dysfunction pills, birth control pills, morning-after pills, and testosterone pills and tell me that there aren’t plenty of unnatural elements of sex within marriage already. And the focus of marriage laws is to a large extent on unnatural things like property rights.

Final thoughts

In the 1996 Romer v. Evans case, the Supreme Court struck down a state law that prevented any local government from recognizing homosexuals as a protected class. It stated, “If the constitutional conception of ‘equal protection of the laws’ [from the Fourteenth Amendment] means anything, it must at the very least mean that a bare . . . desire to harm a politically unpopular group cannot constitute a legitimate governmental interest.” When we consider them, we find that the arguments raised by the anti-same-sex marriage crowd either have no legitimate governmental interest or are simply factually wrong.

To any Christians who may be having second thoughts on their opposition to same-sex marriage, let me suggest a graceful exit. Stop parroting conservative politicians and instead follow the lead of Jesus. We have no record of Jesus scolding homosexuals for what they did between the sheets, but we read much about his concern for the poor and sick. “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” Homosexuality isn’t a lifestyle choice, but hateful Christianity is.

Despite Obergefell, the June, 2015 Supreme Court case legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide, Frank Turek is still flogging this dead horse because it benefits him. He has an audience who will pay him to pat them on the head and assure them that their prejudice is not only reasonable but God given.

We can find a parallel in the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. In the lead-up to the games, Russian president Vladimir Putin caused waves with his anti-gay pronouncements. With Russia in the spotlight, why would he make his country look bad within the international community? But Putin’s intended audience wasn’t the international community; he was grandstanding to the folks back home who rewarded a tough-on-gays attitude.

In a similar way, I doubt Frank cares much what outsiders think. I doubt he expects to convert many liberal Christians to his way of thinking. He just wants to please his conservative Christian constituents. Frank is the anti-gay Pied Piper, leading nervous Christians who are delighted to follow someone who will assure them that the sky is indeed falling and eager to pay for the privilege of being in his club.

If Jesus wants to perform an impressive miracle, he could get these Christians to focus on the actual problems in the world. God knows there are hundreds more important than this one.

“Every human being [already] has the same right to marry someone of the opposite sex”? That’s seriously the empty and heartless sentiment you want to be remembered for, Frank?

History is listening.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 1/21/15.)

Photo credit: Wikipedia
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We’re looking at popular arguments against same-sex marriage (and a few that are just anti-gay). Conservative radio host Frank Turek provides most of the arguments. (Part 1 here.)

9. Human rights are God-given rights!

Rights are not based on human opinion, but on an unchangeable authoritative standard beyond human opinion. That’s why human rights cannot exist unless God exists. Without God everything is simply a matter of personal preference. . . . Human laws can only recognize God-given rights.

Frank needs to study up on how human rights come about. To take one example, voting rights have changed over time in the U.S., and God didn’t play a role at any stage.

As for God giving rights, he’s hardly a good moral model (more here, here, and here). The Bible isn’t law in the United States; the Constitution is, and Christianity is legal in the United States courtesy of the (secular) Constitution. “Because the Bible says so” is an inherently impotent argument in this country.

But let’s go there anyway and see what the Bible says. The Bible doesn’t directly address same-sex marriage. It does, however, make clear its disapproval of mixed-race (or intertribal) marriage. Here’s a modern rejection of interracial marriage from Bob Jones University built on an honest reading of the Bible.

Although there is no verse in the Bible that dogmatically says that races should not intermarry, the whole plan of God as He has dealt with the races down through the ages indicates that interracial marriage is not best for man. (1998)

The statement is unnecessarily hesitant. God plainly forbids intermarriage with foreign tribes (Deuteronomy 7:3). The prohibition against intermarriage is also given in Ezra (9:2, 10:10) and Nehemiah (chapter 13). King Solomon was also chastised for his foreign wives (1 Kings 11).

The apologist might respond that the prohibitions against intermarriage were meant to avoid temptations to worship other gods. That’s true to some extent but irrelevant—they’re still anti-miscegeny laws. If they’re wrong today, why excuse them back then? The Bible’s version of “God-given” rights and demands isn’t a morality than we can tolerate.

To understand the Bible on homosexuality, consider its stance on slavery. Some Christians say that slavery in the Old Testament was just God adapting to the imperfect, wicked customs of the time. All right, but take the same approach toward homosexuality. If God’s attitude toward slavery was adapted to the times (though that attitude makes no sense today), then maybe God’s attitude toward homosexuality was similarly adapted to the times and makes no sense today. These Christians might respond that the Old Testament was wrong on slavery but right on homosexuality, but what—besides personal opinion or preference—would they base that on?

The Bible gives no support to Frank’s “marriage = babies” argument (argument #5 in our critique). One kind of marriage we do see, however, is the marriage of Jesus to the church (as in Ephesians 5:25–27). In this marriage, it’s love that is central, not babies.

Paul is no asset to the Christian position either. He said, “It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman” (1 Corinthians 7:1). This applied to married couples as well (1 Cor. 7:12)—so much for the celebrated role of procreation. He discouraged marriage (7:8–9) and rejected divorce (7:10–11). Marriage wasn’t even a Christian sacrament in the Church until the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. I’m not surprised that Frank hides from this part of the Bible since it defeats his position.

10. Because morals come from the Creator!

Forget about the “separation of church and state” objection. It doesn’t apply here. . . . [The founders] recognized our moral rights come from the Creator and founded the country on “Nature’s Law” consistent with Christianity.

Since the Constitution is explicitly secular, history revisionists like to go back to references to a “Creator” and “Nature’s Law” in the Declaration of Independence. The DoI is an important historical document, but that’s it. These references impose nothing on American society today, and they’re not even Christian references but are deist.

The DoI makes clear that “Governments [derive] their just powers from the consent of the governed,” not God. And when a government becomes abusive, “it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.” The government answers to the people, not God. Frank can’t find much support in this argument. More here.

11. My standard can beat your standard!

Frank next appeals to objective morality. You gotta have an objectively correct moral stance to make any moral claim, Frank tells us, and such a stance admits a god to ground it.

Homosexual activists say we’re wrong. But we can’t be “wrong” unless there is a real standard of “Right” from which we deviate.

Frank adds qualifiers—a real standard or something being truly right—to refer to objective morality, but I doubt that such a thing exists. I impatiently await evidence that there are moral truths that would be true whether anyone believed them or not (explored more here, here, and here).

So we should ask same sex marriage advocates, “What’s your standard? Who said same sex marriage is a ‘right’?” You and your friends? That’s not a right. That’s an opinion.

It’s like Frank isn’t aware of how social change works. You have a moral belief because you’ve concluded that it’s correct. You can then explore the why, but in the end the buck stops with you. It is your opinion.

That may not be much, but it’s all we’ve got. Groundless handwaving that God agrees with you counts for nothing.

So liberals can believe in and fight for same-sex marriage, but they can’t justify it as truly being a right without reference to the Creator. If they do reference the Creator, then they have the rationally dubious task of arguing that God affirms same-sex marriage.

I don’t claim that my conclusions are objectively true, and your claims to be able to tap into objective moral truth are backed up by nothing more than wishful thinking. I agree that God doesn’t affirm same-sex marriage, but God does affirm polygamy. You still want to model marriage after what God says?

Continued in part 5.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 1/15/15.)

Image credit: Wikimedia
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