Supporting gay marriage is an obvious good. But we should be confident enough to face up our differences too.
Tolerance is not enough to learn the art of living with others
by Timothy Radcliffe
orginally published in the Guardian 16th December 2012
(republished with permission)
It is heartening to see the wave of support for gay marriages. It shows a society that aspires to an open tolerance of all sorts of people, a desire for us to live together in mutual acceptance. It seems obviously fair and right that if straight people can get married, why not gay people? But we must resist the easy seduction of the obvious. It once seemed obvious that the sun revolved around the Earth, and that women were inferior to men. Society only evolves when we have the mental liberty to challenge what seems to be common sense.
Many Christians oppose gay marriage not because we are homophobic or reject the equal dignity of gay people, but because "gay marriage" ultimately, we believe, demeans gay people by forcing them to conform to the straight world. Richard Sennett of the LSE argues in Together, the Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Co-operation, that western society fears difference. Because of growing inequality and a fluid society in which people move rapidly from one job and place to another (if they can get a job at all), we do not learn the art of living with people who are unlike us. We are highly tribalised.
He asserts that "tribalism couples solidarity with others like yourself to aggression against those who are different". The internet enables us to bond with like-minded people. If we disagree, we can disengage in a second. Zygmunt Bauman argues that the mobility of modern society encourages "the impulse to withdraw from risk-ridden complexity into the shelter of uniformity".
Tolerance means, literally, to engage with other people who are different. It implies an attention to the particularity of the other person, a savouring of how he or she is unlike me, in their faith, their ethnicity, their sexual orientation. A society that flees difference and pretends we are all just the same may have outlawed intolerance in one form, and yet instituted it in other ways. It says, "we shall tolerate you as long as you pretend to be just like us". We put up with various religious faiths as long as they are confined to the private sphere, or reduced to decorative role. At Christmas, a tree, and a menorah for Hanukkah. Religious conviction, if it impinges on the public sphere, is viewed with a mixture of fear and derision. And so it is both true that modern Britain is a model of multiculturalism, and also that we drift around in a fog of mutual ignorance.
Cardinal Basil Hume taught that God is present in every love, including the mutual love of gay people. This is to be respected and cherished and protected, as it is by civil unions. But to open up marriage to gay people, however admirable the intention, is ultimately to deny "the dignity of difference" in the phrase of the chief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks. It is not discriminatory, merely a recognition that marriage is an institution that is founded on a union that embraces sexual difference. It is not a denial of the equality of the love between two gay people, for all love is of infinite value.
A society that fears difference and does not engage with it will ultimately fall into intolerance. Real conversation with people who are different is frightening: it changes how you view your own identity. In his book on Dostoevsky, Rowan Williams quotes Mikhail Bakhtin: "Dialogue ... is not a means for revealing, for bringing to the surface the readymade character of a person; no, in dialogue a person not only shows himself outwardly, but he becomes for the first time that which he is – and we repeat, not only for others but for himself as well."
An easygoing tolerance, rubbing along beside each other without much curiosity, is not enough. We need to recover a confidence in intelligent engagement with those who are unlike us, a profound mutual attention, otherwise we shall crush a life-giving pluralism. It will not only be gay people who will suffer. We shall all be the poorer.
Father Timothy Radcliffe is an English Dominican. He was Master of the Order of Preachers from 1992 to 2001. His latest book is Take the Plunge: Living baptism and confirmation.
These posts are by guest authors for Fulcrum