Andrew Sullivan: Old World, New World

(Honk to Steve Benson/Slate.com)

Civil marriage is the phrase that should be on every gay person's lips now; I think it's essential to emphasize that we are fighting for, and determined to win, the right to civil marriage, a "fundamental right" of all citizens, as the California Supreme Court recognized back in May. People who disagree with us can keep having their religious marriages recognized by the state, just as they are now; though of course we can also have our religious marriages, those of us who still want that kind of thing.

We are not out to change any church's, any individual's definition of "holy matrimony"; they can keep their beliefs on that subject intact. But we are all equal when it comes to secular matters; civil marriage is the goal, and it is our right as Americans.

Andrew's new essay, "Modernity, Faith, and Marriage," covers a lot of philosophical ground on the gulf between the old white-hetero-male-centric world my generation was born into and the new world of freedom and diversity now dawning. A few choice excerpts relating to the gay marriage issue:

The reason the marriage debate is so intense is because neither side seems able to accept that the word "marriage" requires a certain looseness of meaning if it is to remain as a universal, civil institution. This is not that new. Catholics, for example, accept the word marriage to describe civil marriages that are second marriages, even though their own faith teaches them that those marriages don't actually exist as such. But most Catholics are able to set theological beliefs to one side and accept a theological untruth as a civil fact. After all, a core, undebatable Catholic doctrine is that marriage is for life. Divorce is not the end of that marriage in the eyes of God. And yet Catholics can tolerate fellow citizens who are not Catholic calling their non-marriages marriages - because Catholics have already accepted a civil-religious distinction. They can wear both hats in the public square. . . .

The idea that gay people somehow want to persecute these churches, that we're out to get you, and hurt you and punish you is preposterous. The notion that there are rampaging mobs of gay people beating up on Christians is also unhinged. To take one flash-point between a radical Dominionist group deliberately trying to rub salt in the wounds of Castro Street bar patrons after closing hours - in which no one was hurt - as the harbinger of some kind of mass gay pogrom against Christians is daffy. To equate a few drunk gays with Bull Connor is deranged and offensive. There are elements on both sides who do not represent the core. That core can coexist with mutual respect in the context of legal and civil equality.

We live in a new world, and we can and should create meaning where we can, in civil society, in private, through free expression and self-empowerment. But we cannot enforce that old meaning on others by law. And we certainly cannot do so arbitrarily, to the sole detriment of only one group in society - homosexuals. . . . My advice to the theocons: by picking solely on homosexuals to force back the sexual and spiritual freedom of modernity, you look awful, you are losing the next generation and you are buttressing cruelty and pain. In your heart of hearts, you don't want to do that.

So listen to your heart. Accept civil equality not as a defeat but as an opportunity: to persuade and evangelize for something beyond the civil that still respects the integrity of the civil. That's what America's founders intended. It is part of their genius that today's fundamentalists simply do not understand.

The Bull Connor reference comes from this pious piece of arrogance spouted this week by Mike Huckabee: