When two people marry, why are we still in the habit of labelling it gay marriage? Nobody describes a wedding between a man and a woman as heterosexual marriage, because the word marriage is simply assumed to belong to them already. The persistent little qualifier betrays something worth examining. It quietly suggests that equality still needs a footnote, as though the plain word marriage remained the property of religion and could only be lent out to others under a different name.
Religions have long claimed dominion over human identity itself. They have appointed themselves to decide who may love whom, what role each gender is permitted to play, and even which feelings are acceptable to have. The phrase “the Bible tells us so” has served as the final word on everything from property rights to who does and does not deserve basic compassion. Christopher Hitchens identified the deeper hazard in this arrangement.
“The human wish to be told what to do by an authority figure is one of the things that makes religion so dangerous.”
Christopher Hitchens
Who Owns the Word Marriage
The trouble begins with the claim of ownership. By defining marriage as something bestowed by a deity, religious doctrine manufactured ownership over an entirely human act. The union of two people, which is at heart a promise between two minds, was recast as a contract between dogma and conformity. Once that framing takes hold, any expansion of who may marry looks less like justice and more like trespass, an intrusion onto sacred ground that was never sacred to begin with.
Richard Dawkins cuts straight to the moral confusion at the centre of it.
“There’s nothing moral about obeying orders, even if the orders come from God.”
Richard Dawkins
When marriage is framed as obedience to scripture rather than as a commitment freely chosen, equality itself starts to feel like a threat to the established order. Marriage was a human institution long before any particular religion claimed to have invented it. Couples were pairing off, raising children, and binding their lives together for tens of thousands of years before the relevant texts were written. The deity arrived late and then claimed the deed to property that was never his.
The historical record makes this plain for anyone who cares to look. Marriage has taken wildly different shapes across cultures and centuries, from arranged alliances between families to property transactions, political treaties, and contracts of inheritance. Its forms have shifted constantly to suit the needs of the societies that practised it. The idea that there exists one timeless, divinely fixed definition of marriage is itself a modern piece of mythmaking, contradicted by the messy and varied history of the institution it pretends to describe. What we are really arguing about is a legal and social arrangement, and the state, not the church, is the body that actually recognises it.
The Obsession With Gender Roles
The same instinct drives the relentless policing of gender. The Abrahamic texts were composed by men living in deeply patriarchal cultures that treated women as property and cast men as the appointed gatekeepers of virtue. Those assumptions were baked into the scripture, and the very same passages are now wielded centuries later to police identity in a world the authors could not possibly have imagined. Sam Harris named the strange spectacle of it plainly.
“The problem with religion is that it allows perfectly decent, intelligent people to believe by the billions what only lunatics could believe on their own.”
Sam Harris
There is a reason the categories must be kept so rigid. In the eyes of faith, gender must be strictly binary, because nuance and variation quietly undermine control. If gender turns out to be more fluid than the texts insist, and if love is natural in all of its many forms, then scripture loses its claimed monopoly on defining what is moral. The survival of religious authority depends on pinning human experience into a small number of fixed categories that can be managed, judged, and where necessary punished.
None of this would matter much if the consequences stayed safely on the page, but they do not. The framing has been used to deny people the right to marry, to keep them from their partners in hospital, to strip them of legal protections, and in too many places to justify outright cruelty against them. Real lives are constrained by a definition that was never anything more than one culture’s assumptions written down and declared eternal. The cost of the qualifier is not merely linguistic. It is measured in the freedoms withheld from people whose only offence was loving in a way the old texts did not anticipate.
That is why the variety of actual human lives is treated not as ordinary diversity but as rebellion. A person who does not fit the prescribed mould is experienced as a challenge to the whole system, because the system was built on the pretence that the mould was handed down from heaven and therefore cannot be questioned.
Love Is Not a Theological Question
The secular world has increasingly arrived at a simpler and more honest understanding. Love is not a theological question at all. It is an emotional and human reality, observed everywhere, in every culture, regardless of which gods happen to be worshipped nearby. The phrase gay marriage is best understood as a leftover symptom of the old religious framing, a subtle way of hinting that something different and somehow less valid is taking place. Strip the framing away and the distinction simply dissolves.
Bertrand Russell, who spent a long life weighing such things, put the relevant wisdom in four plain words.
“Love is wise, hatred is foolish.”
Bertrand Russell
Perhaps when society finally stops attaching divine approval to human affection, we will be able to drop the prefixes and speak plainly at last. There is, in the end, only marriage, only love, and only human connection in its many ordinary forms. Gender is human variation rather than moral failing, and the insistence on treating it otherwise is superstition wearing the respectable costume of tradition. The qualifier will fall away on its own, once we stop pretending it was ever needed.