The start of gay marriages in Massachusetts has reinvigorated the fierce debate over this issue. Interestingly, most people who want to make gay marriage illegal or unconstitutional base their position purely on religious grounds. They say that allowing gay people to marry would be against God’s will, that it is contrary to the Bible, or that it would be a sin.

Of course, many other Americans question this kind of religious condemnation of homosexuality and gay marriage. But an equally important question is this: Even if gay marriage does violate some religious tenets, is that a good reason for outlawing it? Should it be unlawful to violate God’s will? Does it really make sense to make sins illegal?

What about other sinful behaviors explicitly prohibited by the Ten Commandments? Would opponents of gay marriage argue that we should also legally forbid people from dishonoring their fathers and mothers? That would certainly make it awfully tough on a whole generation of teenagers. Or what about making it against the law to covet thy neighbor’s house? This would, among other things, put quite a crimp in the real estate business.

Such laws would clearly be absurd. But why exactly? Because it only makes sense to forbid things by law that actually do some substantial harm to other people – things like robbery, assault and so on. That is why we’ve chosen to legally forbid murder, but not envying your neighbor’s remodeled kitchen. One does real harm, the other doesn’t.

And this is exactly where the opponents of gay marriage run into trouble: They have difficulty showing that it will cause any great harm to anyone. Allowing gays to marry may offend or even disgust some people, but it does not actually harm them. It does not have any effect on the status of their marriage. And, while some opponents have argued that it is bad for children to be raised in gay families, studies do not support that contention.

The fact that most opponents can offer only religious reasons for opposing gay marriage is itself a tacit admission that they can’t show that it does any real damage to anyone.

In fact, it seems clear that gay marriage will actually benefit some people. It will extend equal rights to gays, and it will make marriage benefits now available to heterosexual married couples also available to gay couples. So if there are lots of benefits to some people and little real harm to the rest of us, what sense does it make to make gay marriage illegal?

Arguing that something being a sin is sufficient reason for making it illegal is not only wrongheaded, it also pushes the United States away from democracy and toward being a theocracy.

In a democracy, we decide on the legality of a behavior by evaluating the good and the harm that it does to society. In a theocracy, a reference to “God’s will” is sufficient to justify condemning a behavior in law. To see the dangers of this approach, we need only consider what has happened in countries that have become theocracies, such as Iran today or Afghanistan under the rule of the Taliban.

These regimes made the word of God the law of the land to disastrous effect. For example, women in these countries became oppressed by laws that forbade them to drive cars, go to school or even to work – solely because these actions were thought to contradict the will of God.

Most Americans have been appalled by the abuses of these theocratic regimes – and rightly so. But we are less aware of the theocratic tendencies in our own society when they happen to coincide with our own religious beliefs.

We need to remember such telling examples as Iran and Afghanistan when we are considering making gay marriage illegal on religious grounds. Indeed, in a democracy, citizens should stop and think twice every time they are tempted to make unlawful that which they think is sinful. It is a line that we cross at our own peril.



Douglas J. Amy is a professor of politics at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts.

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