A Question of Degree

A brave teenaged girl, Malala Yousufzai, was committed to speaking and blogging for the rights of Pakistani girls to receive a solid education, comparable to what was being accorded to boys of the same age. Fundamentalist Taliban found her stance repugnant to their strongly held religious views that placed Sunni girls and women in the home, tending to chores and bearing children, cloistered from general society, veiled and in the company of family men when out of the house, and most certainly not vying against men for the right to an education or a job in an open workplace. Last October, Malala’s sacrilegious affront to such passionately-held beliefs earned her a Taliban bullet in her head. She barely survived. Now, reasonably recovered (with a metal plate in her brain), she attends school in England paid for by the Pakistani government.

On March 27, the Taliban struck again against this same perceived sacrilege as they used a drive-by to execute a 41-year-old teacher of girls, Ms. Shahnaz Nazli, recently relocated to a new school because of earlier death threats. Her crime: She taught girls at a primary school in Pakistan’s Khyber tribal district. Again, God’s mandate justified this horrible solution. The problem, it seems, is that if there is a religious teaching that is viewed as God’s word, that mere mortals may find the summary execution of little girls or female teachers disgusting, it is not for mankind to question the mandate of God.

It doesn’t matter that this little girl’s or this magnificent teacher’s actions have no impact on the daily lives of the Taliban willing to kill to set an example; it is their mandate that all on earth should follow their “one and only true path.” If some must die in the implementation of God’s will, that is unfortunate but not a reason to avoid following what they really believe is the word of their Lord. In theocracies, there is no room for human deviation from God’s rule, no individual liberties, no individual rights if they go against the Lord’s teaching. That one’s behavior is private and doesn’t impact the lives of passionate believers does not exempt the behavior from punishment.

This willingness to use religion to coerce others to behave in one manner or the other, even if those coerced do not share the same religious belief, was the kind of religious persecution that caused many in Europe to flee to the New World. That our forefathers well-understood the power of religious zeal against those with differing beliefs also gave rise to the separation of church and state embodied in our First Amendment.

Marriage, some will tell us, is an institution based on procreation. It has its roots in “holy” matrimony as the backbone of a family. Yet modern society throws recessions, high unemployment rates and career opportunities in the path of both men and women these days, and there is an increasing trend toward childless marriages in the Western World. “Among most developed nations, one in 10 women in their late 40s have no children, and in Italy and Switzerland, the childlessness rate approaches one in four women… In Australia, Germany, Italy and the US, the proportion of childlessness among women in their late 40s has doubled over the past three decades.”YaleGlobal.yale.edu, March 2, 2012.

Childless marriages? Other than for reasons of infertility? Sacrilegious, if indeed marriage is predicated on procreation. Why we should no more allow childless marriage any more than we allow gays and lesbians to marry their same-sex partners! Even if what they are doing has no impact on the daily lives of those with their own distorted views of God’s mandate. While it may seem outrageous to compare mere religious bigotry that results in discriminatory laws with murder based on strong religious beliefs, both are the result of people believing that their view of God must be imposed on everyone around them. And if some states allow same-sex partners to adopt, how can we deny these children two married parents?

And so we come to the crux of those who fight with passion that marriage is a bond between a man and a woman, and let no changing social pattern rend such sacred bond asunder. So what if American attitudes about same sex marriage are changing rapidly? “[A] Post-ABC poll found that 53 percent of respondents think gay marriage should be legal compared with just 36 percent six years ago… Separately, the Pew Research Center has found that those ages 18-29 support gay marriage at consistently higher levels than their older counterparts.” Washington Post, May 24, 2012.

At its core, since a majority of Americans support this “custom and practice,” the only rational basis for opposing same sex marriage is that is does not comport with a particular interpretation of God’s word. Forget about unequal treatment under the law of “classes” of people for which discrimination cannot be justified… like Jim Crow laws that treated Black Americans as a statutory underclass. You don’t have to make that argument to understand why bans against same sex marriage violate our constitution.

We are not a theocracy. Regardless of stupid politicians’ rants to the contrary, we do not have a state religion. We are a nation of Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, atheists, agnostics, etc., etc., etc. And since the only rational basis for banning same sex marriage is religiously based, neither the federal nor state governments have the power to impose such a religious mandate on the entire population. The United States Supreme Court has just heard two cases: one addressing a state’s attempt to define marriage as between a man and a woman and another to determine if the federal government can deny tax and other “marital” benefits to marriage partners of the same sex. We’ll hear the Court’s response in June.

I’m Peter Dekom, and it does seem as if the one major import the United States needs more than any other is simple empathy.