Rebuttal 2: Moral and legal pluralism's rightful place

In response to our second substantive argument - 'Moral and legal pluralism in relation to same-sex marriage is acceptable' - proposition offers us a number of responses. These can be whittled down to the following claims: 1) States can ignore views that have a religious aetiology when making laws and deciding social policies; 2) Specifically in relation to homosexuality, governments need not be morally agnostic as to whether or not homosexuality - and, hence, same-sex marriage - is acceptable; 3) Since marriage, in its civil guise, bears no necessary or important relation to religious marriage ceremonies, civil marriage should not be exclusive - at most it is religious praxis that need protection, which laws already provide for. After lengthy exegeses by proposition on red herrings such as the fate of intersexed persons, Team South Africa is excited by the first, abeit belated, real argument that speaks directly to the institution of marriage per se (claim 3 above) rather than tangential, wider social issues. Nevertheless, Team USA's analyses is still not cogent - a case of too little, too late. We will deal with the three claims in turn. We deal with the first one below, and list the other two sets of responses separately, for ease of reading. 1. Opposition is in total agreement with proposition that religious ethical views should not be given a *special* place in law making. We never claimed that to be the case, nor would we do so. We rehearsed the religious argument against same-sex marriage, not to own it, but to argue that its existence, and ownership by many citizens in many countries, is an ACCEPTABLE social reality. And, to the extent that views which regard homosexuality and samse-sex marriage as wrong exist, it is OK for laws and social policies, IN THOSE SOCIETIES, to reflect such religious or non-relgious but conservative, conviction, if such conviction runs deeply. Particularly given that the harms of exclusion from marriage have not been established by Team USA, policies reflecting this kind of religious-inspired attitude towards homosexuality cannot be seen as a moral error on the part of lawmakers. In a sense - and we think that this was done in good faith - proposition wrongly assumes that opposition is endorsing the content of religious ethics. We are not. We are endorsing the right of religious ethical views, should they dominate the moral dialectic in a country, to find expression in public policy. Conversely, the view implicit in Team USA's position is, in turn, not value-neutral, not unlike other ethical perspectives. The assumption that liberalism is devoid of moral content is popular but not accurate. A state that priorities individual freedoms over the views of the majority (even where those views do not lead to demonstrable harms as has been the case in this instalment of the same-sex marriage debate); a state that maximises space for as many conceptions of the 'good life' to be lived as possible; a state that refuses to express a view on different identities and lifestyles .... such a state is not morally neutral, since its principles and ethos amount, in themselves, to ONE conception of 'the good life' - a liberal, individualist, secular model of society - that competes with other political and moral visions of an ideal society. The burden Team USA must discharge - alas it is too late - is not ONLY to dismiss religious ethics' exclusive place in policy making (with which we concur), but to give positive argument for why the liberal individualism that drives their dismisall of ANY majoritarian input on the same-sex marriage debate, is ethically correct. The failure to discharge such a burden entitles opposition to conclude that the dismissal of religious ethics' entitlement - or, indeed the entitlement of any non-liberal ethical doctrine - to find expression in the same-sex marriage debate has been hastily and wrongly dismissed by Team USA. Opposition's contention that the existence of moral and legal pluralism within the international community on same-sex marriage is acceptable therefore remains unharmed by Team USA's concerns about religion.