A first

For the first time that I can recall, a comment of mine was rejected (twice) at a conservative web site, obviously because I am gay. It was without explanation but also without the namecalling and death-wishing I sometimes have gotten from liberal gay sites.

So here's the deathless prose of which they deprived their readers.

Although a "gay" man, I am of pretty conservative political attitudes and a knowledegable appreciation for, but distinct distance from, Catholicism & Orthodoxy. I am also not a fan of gay marriage.

My reasons are three: first, since marriage is a bedrock institution and is already under severe stress (from, among other things, a combination of no-fault divorce and feminism), a natural conservative reaction is to avoid fiddling with it anymore. Intentions never control consequences.

Second, even if, on a logical plane, there may be no necessary connection between arguments for same-sex marriage and for polygamy, it seems to me that in our political and cultural world, once you make the gender of spouses irrelevant, how can you argue in principle against a number different from two? Same-sex marriage is a brand new idea; polygamy, like it or not, is an ancient human tradition. I can see the pictures one day of weeping Muslim women, asking why their culture and religion's different idea of love should be banned --making their children illegitimate--when the law allows two men to wear wedding rings? And anything that comforts Islam in the West, for a man such as myself, is very bad news.

Third, and here your readers will likely find it hard to take, I do not think that matrimony does justice to the kind of love and attachment that two men can have with each other. To put it bluntly, taking the very gender-specific connection that makes some men comrades-lovers-kin and trying to fit it into the marriage box is just putting on straight drag. Until the last five minutes, marriage has always assumed the male-female polarity and, at least in principle, the creation of a family, offspring. Consequently, it is not made to institutionalize (or dare I say it, sacramentalize) the union of two male souls and bodies and lives.

To me, the push for gay marriage is part of liberalism's compulsive egalitarianism, with marriage really being a marker of social standing and one more battle against society's "exclusions". The triumph of mere power over imagination.

A man cannot be a mother, nor a woman a father. And if marriage requires both one bride and one groom, one wife and one husband, --at least--then in a gay "marriage" someone is standing in a spot not meant for them. I know that you consider such a same-sex union immoral. But from my standpoint, I consider that gay marriage does not properly honor the specificity of such a union.

The closest natural or archetypal structure men have made for themselves when they wish to ritualize a unique bond is blood-brotherhood.

(http://www.amazon.com/Blood-Brotherhood-Other-Rites-Male-Alliance/dp/0578030705)

In some cultures, this bond was considered even more sacred than marriage. I am not at all asserting that most of these rites were covert marriages. Very unlikely. I merely wish to say that when men are left to their own natural devices to create institutions honoring their deep attachments to each other, something like this, almost totally unique to males, is what they do. Were gay men more self-aware and less fixed on playing the role of the righteous victim, something like this, indigenous to male souls, would be the starting point, not matrimony.

The site, Touchstone, included the Thomas Merton piece I recently posted on. And it had an article on closed Communion by a Baptist minister, explaining why his church limits access to Communion to those who are baptized by immersion; baptism by pouring or sprinkling he considers invalid. Funnily enough, he is a Southern Baptist, whose tee-totalling denomination replaces the wine of the Lord's Supper with...grape juice.