Same-Sex Marriage w/Poll
Sat Jan 15, 2005 at 05:29:27 PM PDT
I've spent some time thinking about what it means to be a Liberal, what it means to be a Democrat. There's a discussion that's gone on here about Gay Marriage and the role of the Democratic Party in ensuring the rights of all Americans.
What follows below the fold is my attempt at a "Point-Counterpoint" on the question of same-sex marriage.
I encourage and welcome everyone with an opinion to weigh in. I think that I know what I believe but I realize that my own naivete may cloud my vision.
So, in no particular order, submitted for your approval below, are some thoughts on same-sex marriage....
"Why should some people get special rights?"
It's not about "special rights", it's about equal treatment under the law. The government doesn't bestow rights upon us, the rights are ours inherently and can only be limited, with our consent, by the government when it demonstrates a reason to do so. By codifying into law a set of benefits and privileges, as marriage does, that are available to some, but not all, citizens, the government is denying some citizens equal treatment under the law. Perhaps the government can show what reasons it has that justify that unequal treatment but if not, it must stop the discriminatory policies.
"Well, ok, but it's not for activist judges to decide, it's for the people acting through the legislature to decide."
The genius of our constitution is that it doesn't allow for a tyranny of the majority. While a majority of the people who bother to show up might vote to lock up citizens of Japanese descent during a conflict with Japan, that doesn't make it okay. If the legislative branch enacts a law, and the executive branch enforces it, and yet an affected citizen believes it to be unconstitutional, then that citizen has a right, and some might say an obligation, to challenge it in the judicial branch. It is then up to the state to demonstrate the reasons that warrant its continuation of the offending policy. If it can't, the judiciary must strike down the law. That is what this country was founded on and that is what keeps it strong.
"But banning same-sex marriage isn't discrimination. All men are treated the same when no man can marry another man, no one man has been singled out"
But that's not how freedom works in America. Suppose that a law bans all white people from marrying any black people; it treats all white people the same. However, the constitution guarantees individual rights, not the rights of classes or groups. So although the law against interracial marriage applies to all white people equally, I, as a white person am still being discriminated against if I cannot marry the INDIVIDUAL of my choice. Even though I'm discriminated against no more or less than any other white person who wants to marry a black person, I am discriminated against nonetheless and that, unless the state can prove otherwise, is unconstitutional.
"Where does it end? Polygamy? Bestiality? Incest?"
To argue that recognizing the rights of some people necessarily leads to an "anything goes" approach to the law is to employ faulty reasoning. Because we allow gun ownership generally doesn't mean that they're aren't compelling interests that allow the government to limit that freedom in certain cases. You can't walk into the courthouse with a gun. However, just because some seemingly normal person might lose his cool and use his gun to take out half of his coworkers doesn't mean that we get to ban guns altogether either. But I digress......
Though I suppose it's possible that the equal protection argument for same-sex marriages might apply to polygamy, and perhaps even incest, I think that there is a case that could be made that the state has good reasons to not allow them. Even if there isn't, denying one person their rights by banning same-sex marriage today because you might have to recognize someone else's right to polygamy tomorrow doesn't sound like a very persuading argument to me. If it's polygamy or incest that you're worried about, then find a constitutionally valid way to ban them.
"Marriage is a sacred institution that has always been one man, one woman"
The government isn't in the business of deciding what is or isn't sacred. That's up to the church, synagogue, mosque or whatever to do. No one is proposing that the government force any church to perform any same-sex weddings, although there are plenty of churches that do so already. This is about civil marriage and the benefits and responsibilities conveyed upon the spouses by the state.
Besides, is it really so sacred when Britney marries for 54 hours in Las Vegas just "to do something crazy" or when Newt Gingrich marries younger wife number 3 or when two 18 year olds tie the knot because she's pregnant and her father will kill him is he doesn't make her an "honest woman"?
Moreover, marriage hasn't always been one-man, one woman. There have been, and still are, plenty of polygamist societies in the world, some right here in America, some even told of in the Bible. There have also been many societies on earth that have recognized same-sex couples in various ways throughout the ages, even including, if the scholarship on the subject is to believed, same-sex ceremonies performed in the middle ages by the Catholic church.
"Marriage is for procreating and only heterosexuals couples can do that."
There is no fertility test for a marriage license. Post menopausal women can marry. People paralyzed from the waist down can marry. No one is claiming that a childless couple, whether by choice or circumstance, is any less married than one with children.
"Yeah, but what about providing the best environment for raising children?"
Suppose that a woman marries just out of high school. Now, bear with me...a few years later, after two kids and a bad marriage and divorce, she accepts herself as a lesbian and her ex-husband is jailed for life on his third marijuana possession conviction. Still later after six years with a committed same-sex partner who has helped to raise the still underage kids the lesbian is hit and killed by a bus while walking home from a Lavender Menace meeting. The dyke partner, who under the law couldn't adopt even though the pothead ex-husband was okay with it, hasn't any legal rights as to what happens next to those kids. The dead lesbian didn't leave any living relatives and the kids are split up and sent to different foster homes and they never see each other or the partner they call "mom 2" again. How's that for family values? (Of course, this is fictitious, but I bet I could find real world stories that are much more harrowing if I were to try.)
More to the point, there's no law that says after a man fathers a child that the mother of that child can force the father to help raise it. She can force his financial contribution, but that's about it. If better and more stable home environments for child rearing are desirable, and I think that they are, then let's find ways to encourage them. Discriminating against same-sex couples isn't one those ways.
"But if marriage can mean anything, then it means nothing"
When more people choose to marry, how is marriage weakened? When couples are allowed to raise their children in households that are recognized by society as legitimate, don't those children grow up to value marriage? When parents, siblings, friends, neighbors and coworkers get to see first hand the loving commitment of two people to each other, doesn't that reaffirm their belief in marriage as a worthwhile institution? When two people make a publicly sanctioned commitment to each other aren't they more likely to work to make that commitment, that marriage, last?
Furthermore, as much as some would seem to like to believe otherwise, most people are heterosexual today not because they've been secretly in the closet waiting for society to legitimize homosexuality and let them "out", but because they are heterosexual by nature. If 2 or 3% of the population enters into same-sex marriages, the wandering eyes of husbands across America will still be looking at the pages of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue and not the pages of the Advocate. Traditional marriage remains safe.
"Well, ok, but so many people think that the GOP is right about this issue, shouldn't those of us on the left just soften our stance a little bit and try to get along to win some elections?"
In a word, no. If liberals, progressives, Democrats, libertarians and others cannot stand up for the basic civil rights of every American, then what in the world can they stand up for?
The struggle for GLBT rights is the last great struggle for equal treatment under the law. Only when the so-called "gay agenda" is fully embraced and enacted can we all truly be free.
That's what I think anyway.
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