A Gallup poll taken in May 2014 showed that Americans believed, 55 to 42 percent, that same-sex marriages should be legally recognized. A poll taken by the Associated Press in January and February 2015 showed that they favored laws in their states allowing same sex couples to be legally married, 49 to 44 percent. They split evenly at 48 percent on whether the Supreme Court should rule same-sex marriage legal on a nationwide basis.
But on the question of whether ‘wedding-related businesses’ — florists, photographers, and caterers — should be able to refuse to participate in a gay wedding, they said ‘yes’ by what was almost a 20-point margin, 57 to 39 percent. In this, they proved themselves more clear-headed, more fair and surely more rational than the national press and a great many liberals in understanding that the key word here is not “gay,” but “wedding,” as concerning not merely a commercial transaction, but involving a time-honored rite.
Take what is perhaps the closest analogy to this situation, which is the cleric who refuses to marry an interfaith couple in which the partner who is not his parishioner has not agreed to convert. He does not “hate” this person, he may like and admire him, but his interest is less in the couple than in his religion, and he thinks this is bad for his faith.
The couple has every right to be married, and a great many people don’t share his concerns, but the idea that the state should force him do something that offends him is utterly ludicrous. But by the standards used by the Left against people who don’t want to cater gay weddings, he ought to be forced to resign.
In real life, somebody else is happy to marry the couple, and they can be recognized by the state, whereas the cleric is happily spared from coercion. This is the compromise worked out over years by the culture to accommodate conflicting demands in a world filled with people whose values are different. This couple has every right in the world to be married — but not to be married by him.
But where you stand depends on where you sit. One well-known gay rights supporter, you might be interested to know, would like to see many fewer marriages between Christians and Jews.
“We have the problem of assimilation. We have the problem of intermarriage,” Debbie Wasserman-Schultz told a meeting in Florida. She thus cast her lot with our fictional cleric, suggesting that rabbis discourage these couples — though if a cleric refused to marry two gays to each other, she might suggest otherwise. But who is she to decide who ought to be punished — and for what he should be punished?
“If you follow Leviticus 18:22 and that drives your opposition to gay marriage, you’re a terrible, horrible homophobe,” Jim Geraghty scolded, “but if you’re opposed to intermarriage of Jews and non-Jews on grounds of ‘lost identity,'” it’s a whole other story, and thus should be totally cool. But “Jewish identity” is to Wasserman-Schultz what Leviticus 18:22 is to religious conservatives. The leeway we give to the rabbi who won’t marry a Jew to a Christian should also apply to the Jew (or the Christian) who will bake anything besides a wedding cake for his or her gay clientele.
How should we tie Wasserman-Schultz into the knots she has coming? Take a nice Jewish boy who wants to marry his gentile boyfriend, and bring up the kids they adopt in the Christian tradition — and see what she says about that.
Noemie Emery, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
