Originally, this column on same-sex marriage was going to begin with a quotation from Dorothy L. Sayers, a British crime writer, poet and essayist in the first half of the 20th century. But events in Albany on Wednesday got in the way. So we’ll rely instead on one of those sports metaphors that abound in politics. This is from football.
All of which is to say that the outcome is uncertain in the State Senate, where the main action is.
On Wednesday, the Democratic-dominated Assembly voted yet again to legalize gay marriage. Nothing new there. More important is that momentum stalled in the Republican-controlled Senate, which had seemed to be moving inexorably, if hesitantly, toward accepting this societal shift.
Now? Who knows? Advocates of an altered definition of marriage have the pledged support of 31 of the 62 senators. They need 32. That requires one more aye vote from a Republican. As of Thursday morning, they didn’t have it.
Naturally, there are political considerations. The Conservative Party has warned that it will withhold support from any Republican who sides with the Democrats on this issue. If that threat is made good, it could cost some Republicans their Senate seats in the next election — and their party its slender majority.
Several senators also have religious concerns, intensified by powerful opposition to same-sex marriage from Roman Catholic Church leaders and some rigorously Orthodox rabbis. The proposed legislation provides for what are called “carve-outs”: Members of the clergy who object to such marriages would not be obligated to perform them or to allow their houses of worship to be used for them.
Why such language is deemed necessary is somewhat perplexing. Where is it now written that priests, ministers, rabbis or imams must preside over ceremonies that violate their consciences? Plenty of them won’t have anything to do with interfaith marriages; nobody seems to consider their refusal a human rights violation.
That said, religion looms large. The state’s most important Catholic leader, Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan, spoke out passionately against gay marriage the other day, writing on his blog that “God, not Albany, has settled the definition of marriage a long time ago.” This is New York and America, not China or North Korea, the archbishop said. “In those countries,” he wrote, “government presumes daily to ‘redefine’ rights, relationships, values and natural law.”
There is no pretense here of being in Archbishop Dolan’s league on matters of theology. But it does seem that rights, relationships, values and even notions of what is meant by natural law have all been redefined by mankind for a good long while. The Bible says, for example, in Deuteronomy 21:18-21, that “a stubborn and rebellious son” should be put to death by stoning. Tempting as that solution may sound at times to exasperated parents, who in the United States today would find it acceptable?
Concepts of what constitutes a couple have undergone transformations as well.
That’s where Dorothy L. Sayers was going to come in. She often wrote on religious themes, and who knows what she might have felt about same-sex marriage. But she did write this verse: “As I grow older and older/And totter toward the tomb,/ I find that I care less and less/Who goes to bed with whom.”
Approve of the trend or not, an ever-growing majority of New Yorkers, and their elected representatives, now feel much the same way.
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Dee Gay
