I read with interest Trey Hoffman’s response to Terry Garlock’s article on the legalizing of gay marriage. I have found Trey’s insights in the past to be well-thought, logically put together analyses, but this one almost seemed to be a visceral response guised in a clever cloak of a concise, hermetic argument.

Trey’s basic premise is we shouldn’t allow gay marriage because our country needs the population created by marriage, which is a big stretch. The issue has nothing to do with population and gay marriage’s affect on it. I’d like to select a few of Trey’s key points and suggest a certain degree of fallacy in the logic.

It is interesting that of all the crises facing America and the world today that Trey picks gay marriage as the cataclysmic problem. I would have picked global terrorism, the inequality between rich and poor nations and its results, or the effects of global warming among many other issues as the major problem of today.

Trey states as a matter of fact that what is legal is also moral. This is hardly the case. To a certain degree those things that many people have moral problems with all have a degree of legal protection. Many people have moral concerns with alcohol, pornography, tobacco, taxation, divorce, legal or illegal drugs, and the government as a whole.

If Christians have the responsibility to create the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, then why are they so worried about the kingdom of man vis a vis our democratic government and its laws?

The legal system does what is can to regulate generally accepted permissible behavior in society, but it hardly means those things have become socially open and acceptable, in other words, “moral.”

I wholly agree with Trey that a father and a mother provide a balance of perspectives that children need. My personal reservation with gay marriage comes from this. However, if I had to choose between a single parent raising children or a same-sex couple raising children, I’d choose the same-sex couple.

My mother was a single parent for many years, and all she did was work to support a household. There was very little time for true parenting. Same-sex couples are a pragmatic solution to the demands placed on a household to both take care of the physical needs and developmental needs of children because there are just plainly more adults around. While one is working, the other can be taking the kids to their soccer game. The advantage of this situation far outweigh the disadvantages.

I need to tell my wife that the fundamental purpose of marriage is to have kids. She’ll like that one. People get married because they want to be happy, and because they have found someone with which they are willing to share a commitment. At 26 when I proposed to my wife I thought she was beautiful, insightful, funny, and gracious. I still do today, 13 years later, and I want to grow old with her. We didn’t know when we got married if we could have children (the odds were with us), and as it turns out we could, but making the whole burden of marriage about having children denigrates the relationship with my wife.

It almost means that as soon as we stop having children then our purpose as a married couple is complete and finished. This is a sad comment on what marriage should be.

I’m glad Trey didn’t go as far as saying that morally sex is only about procreation, but his argument does lead that direction. How many of The Citizen’s fine readers have enjoyed sex with their marriage partner without the slightest intention of it being for procreation, I wonder?

Trey’s ultimate argument is we can’t have same-sex marriage because we have a population problem. In the past and still today, homosexuals would get married because they thought it would “straighten them out.” My personal discussions with people who have done that is that it doesn’t work, usually ending in divorce, or if a couple does choose to stay married, there is a high degree of dissatisfaction due to what doesn’t happen in the bedroom.

These days there is not as much societal pressure to get married for the sake of appearances (a bad reason to get married anyway), but gay men have an understanding that they won’t be having children anyway. This is a practical, unavoidable result. And lesbian women can have children in much the same way as heterosexual women who decide to have children and stay unmarried.

You don’t need to get married to have kids. That is a biological fact. Morally, I have problems with this, but I think it is better than the days in the country when people would marry someone who is abusive just to avoid the stigma of being a single parent.

If we want to do something about the birthrate, there are better ways to accomplish that than prohibiting gay marriage. My wife and I stopped with three kids in part due to the daunting expense of college educations.

Trey is concerned about homosexual displays of affection in public and explaining it to his kids. Frankly, I’m my prudish mother’s son when I frown on all public displays of affection. I think the tattooing and piercing I see in the general public is ugly. I think a lot of younger people need to pull their trousers up and put a belt on. I think people should dress up more for work.

But, I know these are my own personal hang-ups. I just have to get over them, and I don’t take the time to point out to my children how I think about these things. I’d rather take the time to explain the values of trust, honesty, and using common sense to my kids than point out how I disapprove of behavior that isn’t hurting anyone else, even if I think it is unsightly.

Trey presents being gay as a lifestyle choice. Somehow I don’t have the feeling that I made a choice about liking women. I just felt attracted to them. I believe society as a whole is gradually coming to the understanding that homosexuals didn’t choose to be gay men or lesbian in much the same way I didn’t choose to have brown hair. I was born that way.

Nothing in the course of human history has every changed that fact that there have always been homosexual people and always will be.

Starting with the decriminalization or at least un-enforcement of laws targeted at homosexuals, to the removal of homosexuality as a psychiatric disorder from the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1973, to the flawed “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy of the U.S. military, to the legalization of gay marriage in certain European countries, people can fight, but the inevitable will happen: homosexuals will have equal rights, and they will be judged on the content of their character rather than what they do in the privacy of their bedroom.

When my father was in seminary in the 1960s at Vanderbilt, a fellow student favored the “gradual approach” to civil rights. My dad said equality of people of color is going to happen, why don’t we just do it and get it over with.

But, people are going to say to me that the Bible prohibits homosexuality, so here is my simple answer to that. The Old Testament is full of rules. In one of the passages that prohibit homosexual behavior, there is also a prohibition against wearing fabrics made of two different fibers. I think these days everyone has at least one cotton-polyester garment, in violation of this rule.

So, who decided which rules we should follow and which ones we shouldn’t? And, besides, the Old Testament is more of a story about God and his might and glory than a human rulebook. The story of Noah proved that God has the ability to destroy the Earth if He chooses to.

Further, in the New Testament, the Apostle is writing a prohibition against homosexual sex as part of a worship service and not as a blanket condemnation of homosexuality. Greek and Roman tradition was concerned with a pantheon of sexually jealous gods as well as fertility, so religious ceremonies were centered around sex.

As many religious traditions are wont to do, the early Christians borrowed from a tradition they would have been familiar with. The Apostle was simply saying don’t incorporate homosexual acts (and by extension any sexual acts) into your worship services. I’m sure our Puritan forefathers appreciated this prohibition.

I know many of The Citizen’s fine readers will disagree with this, and it makes me so glad I’m no longer a Christian and am part of a religious tradition that seeks ways to include all people in salvation and whose human leaders are more than just interpreters of the rules.

If the modern Church is only about following rules and a subjective code of morality, then Christ’s attempt to usher in the Kingdom of Heaven has indeed failed.

The next argument is that if homosexuality isn’t immoral, then where does everything end? Do we decriminalize incest and allow pedophiles to run rampant in society? Of course not. I would venture that just as many gay and lesbian adults find sex with a minor or close family member as reprehensible as heterosexual adults do.

Children are not emotionally or psychologically mature enough to have sexual relationships, and society’s job is to protect them from predators. Here, our morality is based on what the professionals in the mental health community tell us as well our own moral compasses, but who is hurt when two consenting adults have sexual relations?

If a homosexual couple were to move in next door to me, I would be more concerned about their ability to keep their grass cut and how much noise they make, which would be my concerns about any heterosexual couples.

People don’t like my “it’s not hurting anyone” argument because that means I’m for anything goes. I’m not. Abuse of legal and illegal drugs hurts people and should continue to be illegal as should driving while intoxicated.

I think the fundamental issue with gay marriage is that the Church joins couples in holy matrimony as part of a pact between God, themselves, their families, other believers, and the community as a whole. My definition may be somewhat lacking, but this is in contrast to the legal definition of marriage, which is more about legal responsibility, inheritance rights, and guardianship rights.

Both are called marriage and yet they are fundamentally about different things. If a church wants to join same-sex couples in marriage (or not do so), it is really a decision for that church, but if the government wants to sanction certain rights and responsibilities to a pair of individuals, regardless of their sex, it seems reasonable to do so.

After 15 minutes of signing documents on a Saturday morning at the Cherokee County, Tenn., courthouse 12 years ago, my wife was granted inheritance rights to my estate (and me to hers), guardianship rights of future children, and the ability to draw Social Security, among other things, if I were to die tomorrow.

To deny these kinds of rights to a broad class of people based on a notion of what constitutes a religious marriage seems unethical. It is almost as if some people, based on their personal morality (because it seems the Church can’t completely agree), seek to punish those who have a different morality, but America is about seeking ways to grant participation in the dream, promise, and wealth of this great nation rather than finding ways to take it away.

If a gay man or lesbian dies without a will, probate court decides the estate regardless of how many years a long-term partner lived with and supported the deceased.

When I die with or without a will, my wife shows our marriage license, and she gets everything. Patrick Henry’s declaration of “Give me liberty or give me death,” was just as much about abstract notions of freedom as it was about the concrete rights of individuals and families and their wealth and property.

I’m for granting the promise of America to all law-abiding citizens regardless of their sexual orientation. And as for fixing the population problem, there are much better ways to do it.

Paul Schultz

Peachtree City, Ga.

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