Two weeks ago, Spain’s national legislature passed a bill allowing same-sex couples to marry, adopt, inherit from one another and receive spousal retirement benefits. When it goes into effect, it will be the most comprehensive law of its kind in all of Europe. The Supreme Court agreed Monday to review a law requiring universities receiving federal funding to allow military recruiters on campus, despite military policies that discriminate against gays and lesbians, which violate many universities’ discrimination policies. The struggle for equal opportunity and treatment for lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals stands at a crossroads. In a very real sense, the gay rights movement’s fortunes have never been higher; just ten years ago, few would have dreamed that the discussions and debates about gay rights being held today would have been possible. Yet legislation of the kind recently passed in Spain (and supported by two thirds of Spaniards, despite vehement clerical condemnation) is still politically unfeasible in the United States, and in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2003 Lawrence decision (which found anti-sodomy laws unconstitutional) several states experienced an anti-gay-rights backlash during the 2004 elections. Opponents of the normalization of gay rights claim that the debate over gay marriage, adoption and benefits is one in which values should prevail. Those in favor of securing such rights would be wrong to disagree with such a claim. Instead, they should ask exactly what values should come first: the religious and political values of particular groups, or the more fundamental values that maintain the functioning of American democracy? The most frequent justification given for legal discrimination against same-sex couples (other than, it sometimes seems, mere disgust and animosity) is that such relationships are religiously proscribed. This is a claim that should not be dismissed lightly, and it is one that many religious same-sex couples and their families often find difficult to grapple with. However, it seems exceedingly odd to say that one group’s views should be allowed to intrude upon the lives of the members of another group. Religious opponents of gay rights are essentially calling upon the government to bring about a state of affairs that would better satisfy their own religious views at the expense of others’. That does not appear to be a function of government that the drafters of the Establishment Clause had in mind. To argue, as many do, that to legalize same-sex marriage would open the door for legalized polygamy is to engage in some rather spurious logic. What should trouble us about polygamy is not that is a nontraditional form of marriage, but that it is an inherently unbalanced and unequal relationship, in which a sole spouse of one sex enjoys disproportionate power over several spouses of another. Like heterosexual couples, same-sex couples do not have this problem. Perhaps the most frequently used argument against granting adoption rights to homosexual couples is that children in such families would become homosexual themselves. The available social science data do not appear to support this claim, but that is irrelevant — even if children raised in such families invariably turned out to be homosexual, what reason would we have to prevent that from taking place? I suggest that a majority of Americans would be shocked by a law preventing Muslim couples from adopting out of the fear that their children would someday become terrorists, or by a law preventing deaf couples from adopting because their children would learn sign language before they learn spoken English (if they learn it at all). Why, then, should we treat same-sex couples any differently? A law allowing same-sex couples to marry and to adopt would not compel Americans to approve of their homosexuality, but merely to acknowledge their fellow citizens’ freedom to love each other and raise children as they see fit. To deny them that freedom is untenable in a diverse and pluralistic democracy. A vigorous national discussion about the religious morality of homosexuality is entirely appropriate in a healthy democracy, but making the members of a particular group into second-class citizens by prohibiting them from enjoying some of the most basic privileges of citizenship is not. The battle for equal treatment, opportunity and recognition for same-sex couples is the defining moral battle of our generation, and it can be won before we pass leadership on to the next. All that needs to happen is for us to acknowledge our fellow Americans’ basic human dignity, to respect their freedom, and to celebrate their love. Rob Hunter ([email protected]) is graduating Phi Beta Kappa in political science and philosophy. He will be enter the Ph.D. program in the Department of Politics at Princeton University in the fall. This is his final column for The Badger Herald.