Omitting the obvious argument...

There's something that has always bothered me about the rhetoric surrounding gay rights. Sometimes the advocates of gay rights base their arguments on the fact that sexuality is so central to human identity that denying rights to gay people is tantamount to denying who they are.

I'm sure that's true. The problem with that argument is that there are clearly people in society with very deep desires that nobody thinks they should be allowed to act upon. If, for instance, my sexuality entailed violent urges, nobody would say, "well, that's just who he is, and we should all just celebrate diversity. Let the man murder!!"

Nobody ever seems to make what to me is the actual argument in favor of gay rights and that is that gay relationships and gay sexuality don't harm anybody. The reason to allow gay marriage isn't that everybody should always automatically be allowed to "be who they are;" it's that this particular form of being-who-you-are is harmless.

I'm guessing people don't make this incredibly obvious point because it's hard to feel excited about something that just...is fine. It's ok. It's harmless. It's not bad.

I mean, it's more than that...it's good that having the right to fulfill their desires makes those people happy. But that by itself isn't really relevant to the legal question. The legal question should be, "does this behavior cause harm to non-consenting third parties?" If not, then of course, we should allow it, just as we should allow people to buy socks and go to restaurants and draw pictures and do all the gazillion other things we allow people to do.

It's reason, not some amorphous value like tolerance or diversity, that justifies gay rights. I see an unsettling parallel between the left's rhetoric about acceptance and diversity and the right's libertarian rhetoric that deifies atomistic individualism. People are social beings. You don't just get to do whatever you want! No matter how much you want to. How do we decide which types of diversity to embrace and which to sanction? There has to be some higher level value that allows us to make that distinction, and that value is the harm principle: if nobody's getting hurt, the default setting should be to allow it.