Please forgive my ignorance of the law, but I have a simple question about gay marriage: Isn't this most simply construed as a question of sex discrimination?
I'm sure we've all heard the tired anti-gay line about equal rights--That is, gay people do have equal rights because they have the same right to marry a member of the opposite sex that a straight person does. A nonsensical side-step of the issue, but one that makes semantic sense.
But if we're going to play semantics with the issue, isn't this fundamentally a question of equality between the sexes? Forget the gay/straight division, the real line that's being drawn is between men and women. Laws banning gay marriage, in effect, mean that men and women are forced into separate categories regarding who they can marry.
Any woman in the country (blood relatives aside) is free to marry a man. But any given man is not--simply because they're a man. They're denied that right based entirely on their sex. And the same goes in reverse, of course. Men and women pure and simple do not have equal protection under the law regarding marriage. Even if you wanted to make a separate-but-equal argument (and we all know how wonderful those are), the groups clearly are not equal--there are slightly more women than men in the country, meaning that in the absence of equal marriage opportunity men have a greater array of choices than women.
Even if gays aren't a protected class of citizen (ridiculous as that is in of itself), surely sexual equality is enforceable. What wrinkle in the law allows for this kind of inequality? Any expert--or any one of the many people more familiar with this topic than me, in fact--who can clue me in will be much appreciated.
Thanks.