Hitchens On Gay Marriage

On the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal. Hitchens. A hero of mine. That caustic irreverent articulate scruffy demon!

Here’s a couple of things:

What do I really know about this, when I ask myself? I know that homosexuality is innate in our species, and perhaps in other species also, and thus that it is nonsense to speak of it as an offense to “nature,” and nonsense on stilts to speak of it as an offense to any presumable Creator (belief in whose intentions is Andrew [Sullivan's] problem and not mine). I know that homosexuality is a form of love, not just a form of sex, and thus that it deserves respect if not reverence. I know that our theocratic enemies are, and that our former totalitarian enemies were, ugly and paranoid on the point.

Also:

Why are the advocates of the one and only and immemorial man-woman marriage apparently so chronically insecure? On the same floor as the Hitchens family live two chaps, who are as clearly spliced as any couple I know. They hold responsible Washington jobs, they take an interest in the civic health of the city, and they help raise the children of a previous marriage into which one of them had entered. (Never forget, by the way, the forgotten hell that was the consequence of pressure for gay people to try to marry heterosexuals and make a go of things.)

In any domestic emergency involving my wife or daughter, I would probably turn first to these neighbors. The only discomfiting thing I find about their domestic arrangements is their practice of clasping hands for grace before meals. I can’t make myself feel that my own marriage is undermined, or rather would be undermined, if they could legally tie the knot. Would I dance at their wedding? Undoubtedly, and always assuming I would be asked. Would my tenderly nurtured daughter go into shock? I can’t see it happening.

Me neither.

But it is his last point that makes me grin:

When I become bored or irritated by the gay marriage battle–and I do, I sometimes do–I like to picture the writhing faces and hoarse yells of the mullahs and the fanatics. Godless hedonistic America, not content with allowing divorce and pornography, has taken from us our holy Taliban and our upright Saddam. It sends Jews and unveiled female soldiers to our lands, and soon unnatural brotherhood will be in the armed forces of the infidels. And now the godless have an election where all they discuss is the weddings of men to men and women to women! And then I relax, and smile, and ask my neighbors over, to repay the many drinks and kind gestures that I owe them.

Hitchens does make vocal his concern (and my concern) about “grandstanding” judges, mayors, and elected officials. But then he writes:

…surely this problem, and not sexuality, ought to be the province of constitutional law. The Texas sodomy statute, for example, should have been struck down or repealed not as a “rights” or “equal protection” matter, but because it was an attempt to instate the teachings of a book that not all of us regard as holy, and to make an establishment of religion. Nothing can possibly violate the letter and spirit of the Constitution more than that.