The modern world today is divided between moral, family-loving believers on the one side and supposedly permissive, corrupt, family-destroying secularists on the other. The claim that support for gay rights and gay marriage is synonymous with opposition to family values and sexual responsibility is idiocy, to say the least.
The self-righteous religious conservatives refuse to acknowledge that the pressures endangering the family do not come from some dark-secular-leftist conspiracy, but from cultural and economic forces that affect us all. People are encouraged to put all sorts of things (career advancement, wealth, fame, the accumulation of things, various forms of self-indulgence) ahead of being good parents and spouses. Our workplaces are not as family-friendly as they could be.
Devotion to family values has nothing to do with ideology. The secular and liberal-minded parents do crowd school meetings, flock to their kids’ sporting events, help them with homework and teach them right from wrong on the basis of values. They do not differ much from parents who are active in their religious congregations, and take their family responsibilities as seriously as the believers do.
And those of us who are liberal would insist that our support for the rights of gays and lesbians grows from our sense of what family values demand. How can being pro-family possibly mean holding in contempt our homosexual relatives, neighbors and friends? How much sense does it make to preach fidelity and commitment and then deny marriage to those whose sexual orientation is different from our own? Rights for gays and lesbians don’t wreck heterosexual families. Heterosexuals are doing a fine job of this on their own.
Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.
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