Griswold argues that those who disapprove of SSM should not be cowed by the majority, whether numerical or just vocal, who call them bigots. Just because a plurality endorses an idea doesn't make that idea reasonable or right.
She says this:
It’s OK to oppose the majority on this one. And thus it’s OK to oppose this piece of marriage-centric legislation.The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates admonished his pupil Crito that following the majority is not prudent: "[The majority] cannot make a man either wise or foolish, but they inflict things haphazardly.”
First, marriage matters. It matters to the government, with traditional marriage rightly having distinct legal protections as the only union that naturally produces children — for the sake of whom those marriages should remain intact.
The government has no interest in people’s sexual behaviors except if those behaviors produce children, who are vulnerable for some 20 years of their lives and therefore must be legally protected in ways adults don’t need to be.
The legal protection children require is marriage, and thus marriage is not a sanction of any form of adult sexuality or affection but about children. And since same-sex relationships by nature cannot produce children, they don’t need government involvement.
But marriage matters for so many other things too, not least of which are physical health and wellness, societal flourishing, home building, and financial planning. It also matters to the God who created it — so it matters not what most people think.
Jack Phillips didn’t care what the majority thought when he kindly served gay customers yet declined to celebrate a same-sex marriage by designing a wedding cake. Neither did Barronelle Stutzman, who made friends with a frequent gay customer but couldn’t in good conscience participate in his homosexual wedding even though it meant losing almost everything.
They know marriage matters, and in their courage and conviction, they refused to jump off the cliff. Cowardly lawmakers who would go along with the majority on the Respect for Marriage Act would take another hacksaw to the lives and business of these two and so many others like them, whose First Amendment rights would just be further eroded by contrived rights.
Second, it isn’t a slippery-slope fallacy to recognize the ways in which the goalposts have shifted since Obergefell. What was once “two consenting adults in the bedroom” has become in-your-face, LGBT-positive programming for schoolchildren.
The right to marry has become the right to adopt a child. And “accept us” has become “affirm us.”
So far, anywhere “sexual orientation” has come to be foisted on the public, “gender identity” is sure to follow, and there’s no reason to believe Congress codifying a federal “right” to marry won’t spawn a federal “right” to any sex-specific space you so choose or the castration of children, doctors’ consciences be damned.
Socrates believed that the majority is often governed by their emotions rather than their reason. For him, wise persons are heroic figures, committed to doing what's reasonable, not what the masses tell them they should do, even if this means that they stand alone, even if it means that they suffer the obloquy of those who substitute insults and threats for reasons and argument.
Socrates was willing to die for what he believed, and did.
Unfortunately, few of our contemporary politicians and even fewer of our media personalities are similarly committed. Senator Joe Manchin (D. WV) is perhaps an exception. Most of his colleagues have their fingers perpetually to the wind or they do whatever their told to do by their leadership.
Anyway, I've written on some of the reasons for resisting same sex marriage here. In short, it's the another step, IMO, toward achieving a goal held by the left since at least the early 19th century - the abolition of marriage and the family.
