Liberala argument mot samkönat äktenskap

Kan man säga nej till samkönade äktenskap på liberala grunder? Susan Shell, professor i statsvetenskap på Boston College, tror i alla fall det. I det senaste numret av The Public Interest skriver hon:

Liberals typically uphold the right of individuals to pursue their own understandings of happiness, so long as they do not encroach upon the rights of others. What, then, can weaken an apparently liberal presumption in favor of allowing people to define marriage however they choose, other than an illiberal deference toward a particular religious norm that has no right to political establishment? The answer lies in marriage itself, as it has been understood and practiced almost universally.

Though it is often assumed that no principled liberal case exists against gay marriage, this is incorrect. In a liberal democracy, private groups may hold their own views on the desirability or reprehensibility of homosexual relations. But it is not the business of the state either to endorse or forbid such practices publicly. Neither is it the business of the liberal democratic state to define marriage in a way that speaks to the special needs of a single sect. Liberalism proceeds by taking its fundamental bearings from certain basic human experiences about which sectarians can reasonably be expected to agree ”” for example, the general human aversion to violent death and the claims to which that aversion naturally gives rise. Thus the first step in defining a liberal approach to marriage is to find a way of understanding marriage that is similarly true to the human situation and at the same time relatively impartial with respect to present-day sectarian conflicts.

A suitable account of marriage might begin as follows: Most human societies have honored the notion that special responsibility for children lies with the biological parents. This has also been the view of almost all influential thinkers on the subject ”” including “liberal” ones. No known society treats the question of who may properly call a child his or her own as simply “up for grabs” or as a matter to be decided entirely politically as one might distribute land or wealth.

Läs vidare i hennes artikel The Liberal Case Against Gay Marriage.

Den intresserade kan även läsa Stanley Kurtz artikel Going Dutch? som handlar om erfarenheter från debatten i Nederländerna inför beslutet att införa en könsneutral äktenskapslagstiftning. Kurtz skriver:

Today, marriage is in trouble in the Netherlands. In the mid-1990s, out-of-wedlock births, already rising, began a steeper increase, nearly doubling to 31 percent of births in 2003. These were the very years when the debate over the legal recognition of gay relationships came to the fore in the Netherlands, culminating in the legalization of full same-sex marriage in 2000. The conjunction is no coincidence.

A careful look at the decade-long campaign for same-sex marriage in the Netherlands shows that one of its principal themes was the effort to dislodge the conviction that parenthood and marriage are intrinsically linked. Even as proponents of gay marriage argued vigorously–and ultimately successfully–that marriage should be just one of many relationship options, fewer Dutch parents were choosing marriage over cohabitation. No longer a marked exception on the European scene, the Dutch are now traveling down the Scandinavian path.

God läsning! Och tänk på detta: om det varken finns goda liberala eller konservativa argument för det samkönade äktenskapet, vilka argument finns det då egentligen? Kan det vara, som Kurtz skriver, att starka krafter helt enkelt vill avskaffa äktenskapet? I Nederländerna var detta något som uttalades offentligt. Så inte här i Sverige. Därför är det hög tid för äktenskapets försvarare att resa sig nu. Räta på ryggen och ge dig in i kampen. Yvonne Andersson kanske inte klarar sig själv.