There's nothing new about the struggle over gay marriage and evolution. Fortunately, there will also be nothing new about the resolution to either struggle. History has told us everything we need to know about how this will play out in the end.
Both of these issues represent a continual pattern in which religious dogma meets science head-on. In all cases, the church reacts predictably:
1. Denial.
2. Suppression.
3. Try to legalize it out of existence.
4. Incite socio-political struggle.
5. Concede defeat in the end when the science becomes too obvious to oppose.
Everyone is (or should be) familiar with the church's opposition to all things progressive -- where progressive means "more interested in truth than tradition." At the very least, everyone knows about Galileo. As punishment for observing the truth that the earth revolves around the sun, he was censured in perpetuity, confined to his house for the rest of his life, and his books were banned. What many people do not know is the story of Maria Celeste, Galileo's daughter. Secret correspondences between the two suggest that she was sympathetic and supportive of his love of astronomy as well as his discoveries. It is suspected that she helped write some of his books. We will never know for sure. She was confined to a monastery and relegated to second class citizenship. Because of her gender. Because the church wanted it that way.
The church also wasn't very kind to Galileo's predecessor, Copernicus. Although he was not formally censured, his book on heliocentrism was held from publication for years. The unauthorized preface added by Lutheran astronomer Andreas Osiander read suspiciously like current day disclaimers about the nature of evolution. "He explained that astronomers may find different causes for observed motions, and choose whatever is easier to grasp. As long as a hypothesis allows reliable computation, it does not have to match what a philosopher might seek as the truth." (LINK)
And then there was Bruno. Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake thirty-ish years before Galileo was censured. In a political maneuver still employed by the Vatican and FOX News, the church suppressed, re-wrote, and obfuscated history to cover up the fact that Bruno's punishment centered on his support for heliocentrism.
The interesting thing about heliocentrism is that the church's opposition to it didn't "officially" end until 1992, when Pope John Paul II issued an apology and lifted the edict against his works. Cynics will shrug this off as "typical religious nuttiness," but it represents something more profound and powerful. At some point (probably lost to history), the church realized that the battle was lost. Every astronomer in the world pretty much agreed that the church was wrong. Astronomy had progressed to the point that objections to heliocentrism would be met with the same kind of derision as claiming the earth was flat. The church recognized the danger of admitting fallibility and chose instead to quietly slink back into the shadows.
And certainly with no apologies to the people whose lives had been ruined and even ended by their zealotry.
Today's struggles over evolution and homosexuality parallel this narrative, but there are some important technological differences. Obviously, things move faster today. Within twenty years of the discovery of the gene, virtually every biologist in the world had access to them. Things move even faster today, with online access to the latest journals available instants after publication. With luck, today's struggles will take far less than centuries to resolve.
Unfortunately, the technology works both ways. The church's access to millions of (non-scientist) believers is unparalleled in history. They are able to spread socio-political discontent in ways that would have been inconceivable even a century ago. The power of democracy is (ironically) performing the same function today as monarchial suppression. Millions of uninformed voters are electing legislators who then legalize the same kinds of scientific suppression -- from bans on stem cell research to DOMA to stickers disclaiming evolution as "just a theory." It has always been true that science is harder to understand than religious dogma, and the under-educated masses are just as powerful as dictators if given the proper tools.
In the end, we can be sure that the church will lose. Evolution is fact, and homosexuality is normal, and the scientific community has known these things beyond remotely reasonable doubt for decades. The question is how vehemently today's Galileos and Brunos will insist that reason prevail over superstition. Perhaps the more important question is whether we have learned enough from history to demand accountability from the church for the suffering it has caused and is causing while denying reality in favor of dogma.
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