Issue date: 4/4/05 Section: Opinion

This past November, 11 states had constitutional amendments on the ballot that would ban same-sex marriage.

They all passed.

I thought that this tremendous loss would send a clear message to the gay-marriage movement that it needs to modify its message. But -- nearly five months after Election Day -- it is obvious that the message remains the same: Gay-marriage is a matter of equal treatment under the law and therefore homosexual couples should be granted the same right to marry as heterosexual couples.

It's a powerful argument. But it sure won't convince the center-right voters who approved the amendments in those 11 states that gay marriage should be legal. Why? Because the American public does not see gay marriage as an issue of equality, but rather as an issue of morality.

This is exactly where the gay-marriage movement has failed; while it has fully engaged the issue of equal rights, it has neglected the issue of morality and allowed conservatives to skillfully use it as a weapon against them. Obviously, change is needed: To succeed, gay-marriage activists need to convince the center-right voter that, while they respect peoples' moral beliefs about homosexuality, by the same token of tolerance, homosexuals should not be discriminated against by the law when it comes to marriage.

Live and let live.

It's a simple message, and one that I think is palatable to voters of every age group, region and gender since America prides itself on tolerance -- the ability to agree to disagree yet still have respect for one another and live under the same roof.

Contrast that with the gay-marriage movement's current approach toward individuals who believe that homosexuality is immoral. Just last month, for example, gay-rights activists in Chicago marched on the residence of Chicago Archbishop Francis George, calling him a homophobe and declaring the Catholic Church to be a "house of hate" for its moral stand against same-sex unions.

Under the First Amendment, those activists had every right to stage such a hostile protest. But protests like these are absolutely counterproductive to the gay-marriage movement since they make it all the more difficult for gay-marriage activists to convince people of the justice of their cause. And I'm not talking about Rick Santorum or Bill Frist or George Bush or any other politician who wishes to legislate morality and religion in our pluralistic society. I'm talking about center-right voters -- the same ones who supported the gay-marriage bans in those 11 states -- who feel afraid to speak their minds on homosexuality for fear of being insulted and have thus turned to Santorum, Frist and Bush to protect their moral principles, which they feel are threatened by a secular movement in a zero-sum game of morality warfare.

Nonetheless, gay-marriage activists have continued with the losing strategy of engaging conservatives in moral warfare precisely because they see moral opposition to homosexuality as mutually exclusive with gay marriage.

They are not, however, mutually exclusive.

My sister is a lesbian. I acknowledge and respect that and do not believe that she should be entitled to fewer legal rights than a heterosexual person. If she wants to enter into a union with her girlfriend someday, she ought to be able to do it -- provided that the wedding cake is sweetened with Splenda since I am on Atkins.

I believe all of this despite the fact that I am a practicing Catholic who is morally opposed to homosexuality ... and carbohydrates.

And this is precisely the key insight which the gay-marriage movement should leverage in order to win the moral upper hand in this debate. The best way to do this is with a new message: "While we strongly disagree with your views on the morality of homosexuality, such views should not stand in the way of equal treatment under the law for all Americans." Such a cease-fire in the moral warfare would force the individuals who oppose gay marriage to re-evaluate their position. Clearly, it would then be easier to point out to them that they are, in fact arguing for intolerance -- that they are no better than the angry white Southerners who tried to impose their prejudices on society by arguing for segregation in the face of the mounting civil-rights movement.

But when making comparisons with the civil-rights movement of the '60s, we must remember that it triumphed because it embraced the live-and-let-live philosophy. That is, it realized that individuals had the constitutional right to hold backward and racist opinions about others, but they had no right to legislate those opinions onto others. Similarly, the gay-marriage movement must realize that individuals have the right -- and will duly exercise that right -- to believe that homosexuality is immoral, but they do not have the right to legislate that moral conviction onto others.

A center-right country requires a center-right strategy. That is the challenge, and this is the answer: Live and let live.

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Cezary Podkul is a junior management and philosophy major in Wharton and the College from Chicago, Ill. Cezary Salad appears on Mondays.

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