Gay Marriage By 2020

I was reading a fictional account in which a gay man asks a pastor, a long-time friend, to perform his same-sex wedding. Although the pastor tries to keep his cool, the prospect  appalls him. He warns that if this event did occur, he would avert his eyes in disgust if the two men kissed in front of him. He would be “totally grossed out.” Ultimately he decides that he cannot perform the wedding, mainly because “I’m a little worried about eternal damnation.” So I ask you: what kind of backwoods fundamentalist fringe church are we dealing with here? Plenty of Christians reject the idea of same-sex marriage, but the overwhelming majority would surely respond much more charitably to a practice that has acquired solid mainstream respectability. Fear of hellfire over that issue? Really? Is this Westboro Baptist?

The story-line I am describing actually occurred in Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury cartoon strip in 1999, and the characters were Doonesbury veterans. The gay man was former campus agitator Mark Slackmeyer, and the fictional cleric was Scot Sloan, another holdover from the turmoil of the 1960s. (His name is meant to recall William Sloane Coffin). In his prime, Rev. Scot was lauded as “the fighting young priest who can talk to the kids,” and his radical principles continued into later years, as he struggled for the rights of Central American migrants. Yet as recently as 1999, the very liberal Trudeau was still depicting the idea of gay marriage as so off-the-wall radical, and alarming, that it will panic even a veteran ultra-liberal.