With the signing of the Respect for Marriage Act, Christmas came early for supporters of codified gay marriage. In the process, the 12 GOP senators who voted for it also delivered an early Christmas present to the transgender lobby by acknowledging the American Left’s sexual worldview.
Gay marriage is founded on the premise that a man can replace a woman in a marriage and vice versa. In other words, the sexes are interchangeable. This blurring of lines between the sexes has been a long-standing objective of the Pride Movement, whose disdain for marriage was articulated in Carl Witt’s 1970 Gay Manifesto. If men and women are indeed replaceable and interchangeable, the trans agenda becomes the logical end.
The trans ideology holds that men and women can switch gender (or adopt a third one) according to feeling and even become the opposite through hormones and surgery. Men can transition to replace women as mothers, and vice versa – or some combination of all the above.
Now before you accuse me of the slippery slope fallacy, one must remember that the entire Pride Movement, from gay marriage to transsexualism, hinges on the idea that gender is “imposed socially” (aka a social construct). The manifesto cites the demolition of gender and gender roles as one of the Pride Movement’s biggest goals. And this is where the GOP senators who voted for the legislation made their giveaway.
On the surface, the legislation seemed like the right thing to do. Ronna McDaniel’s 2021 vision for the GOP envisioned a “big tent” that would invite all and balance the interests of LGBT Republicans against those of the GOP’s traditional Christian constituency. With 71% of Americans having come to terms with gay marriage, it seemed like a losing issue to oppose. After all, the voice of the people is the voice of God – at least as far as politicians depending on the popular vote go.
But despite any good intentions, the GOP leadership committed the crucial error of implicitly accepting that gender is a social construct – gay marriage can only exist if this condition is met. It rejected the idea that men and women are different and gave the American Left the key plank of its radical 60s platform.
Going forward, the party will find it hard to defend the traditional family or “family values” because in accepting the RMA, the senators implicitly accepted that neither marriage nor the family meaningfully exist. And they left traditional American families and the institutions they revere open to lawsuits if they choose to follow their sincerely-held beliefs.
Any arguments against men and women’s sports, critical gender theory, and all of these other culture war issues will fall flat. After all, how can one defend the idea that a man shouldn’t play on a woman’s team if you have already admitted that neither really exist? The same goes for transgender surgery, boys in girls bathrooms, or a host of other issues. The only way is to accept that gender is not a social construct.
In a republic, the job of elected representatives is not only to uphold their constituents’ interests. Their chief duty is to uphold the public good – public opinion be damned – and defend the principles that made the country great. Marriage as exclusively between a man and woman is one of these – our own Founders were adamant about that. And ironically, it may cost the party as the Republican electorate moves rightward and emphasizes the United States’ Christian republican roots over “big tent” politics with progressives and commitment to raw democracy.
Michele Gama Sosa is an opinion editor for the Daily Caller.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.