No Biology, Lots Of Religion

by tristero

The title of the Times article is Using Biology, Not Religion, to Argue Against Same-Sex Marriage and yet, for the life of me, I can’t find any biology whatsoever in the article. Unless, I suppose, this very odd assertion counts as biology for the NY Times:

“It takes a man and a woman to create children and thus create a family,” Mrs. Galloway, 60, told a legislative panel in Connecticut last year as it was considering a bill to legalize same-sex marriage.

The assumption here seems to be that the man and woman who create the specific children are, by necessity, the only ones who can create the family. That eliminates not only same sex marriages but adoptions and various kinds of high tech conceptions involving donor sperm or eggs as well.*

And that makes their assertion, dear friends, primo grade christianist claptrap. And indeed:

While they are Christians, the Galloways say they refuse to use religion to defend their view of marriage because it just muddies things.** And they insist they are accepting of everyone, regardless of sexual orientation.

By protecting heterosexual marriage, what “we’re trying to do is protect the foundation of society,” Mrs. Galloway, a volunteer worker from Trumbull, Conn., said in a telephone interview on Saturday.

“Everyone who disagrees is automatically labeled a right-wing bigot,” she said.

Her husband added, “How can you be a bigot when you’re looking out for society as a whole?”

I’m sure the commenters here would be happy to answer that one…

*In this context, it’s noteworthy that the Galloways seem to practice what they preach. They are childless and, while it is not known from the article if they tried advanced fertility techniques, apparently they have not adpoted.

**One could make a case that this is literally true. Their argument uses the trappings of a religion to advance a secular cultural/political agenda. This is christianism, not Christianity.

One could also make a case that what they are saying is pure assertion without any backup, scientific or religious.

Regardless, what they seem to be specifically saying, and what they practice – that the same man and woman used to create a child must be the same man and woman who create the family with the child – certainly is not an assertion based in biology.