Broadly put, the Western monotheistic traditions hold that human beings are made in the likeness and image of God, and are thus all equal in the sight of the Lord. (In his The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, written in 1649, John Milton put the matter bluntly: “No man…can be so stupid to deny that all men naturally were born free, being the image and resemblance of God himself.”) If a person is homosexual by nature—that is, if one’s sexuality is as intrinsic a part of one’s identity as gender or skin color—then society can no more deny a gay person access to the secular rights and religious sacraments because of his homosexuality than it can reinstate Jim Crow.
I have made this argument before (and Ted Olson, who, with David Boies, successfully argued the Proposition 8 case, wrote a cover story for us on the issue earlier this year). The reaction from the right has always been comfortably predictable, and no doubt will be again. The problem for those who assert biblical authority in support of traditional definitions of marriage is that one could, with equal validity, assert that the lending of money or certain kinds of haircuts are forbidden by God, or that slavery and the subjugation of women are authorized by the Lord. Scripture is not inerrant; believers are called to interpret biblical texts in light of tradition and reason. For now the debate is about civil marriage, but much of the opposition to opening the institution to gays and lesbians comes from those who profess a faith of charity. In the fullness of time, I suspect that bigotry against homosexuals will seem as repugnant as racial prejudice does today. Or so one hopes.
In other words, the Word of God, like the U.S. Constitution, is to liberals just another "living, breathing document" that cries out to be modernized to fit the most current evolution of identity politics. If God exists, then He must be edited as propagandistically and relentlessly as a so-called "news" magazine.
