I have been trying to wrap my head around the Proposition 8 issue these past few days. And all I can come up with is this question...
"Give me a good reason why".
I have already determined that if the hypothetical gay couple down the hypothetical street gets married, it doesn't lessen for me what it means to be married. I think when Brittney and Kevin were married, or when Brittney married her high school friend in Vegas in an union lasted a whole twenty-eight hours, that was far more of a slap in the face of that institution called marriage.
But, of course we can't keep stupid people from getting married on a whim, but we can prevent committed, loving, caring people to wed, based on the sole reason that their genders match?
And the reason for that would be...?
I read somewhere somebody's opinion on this issue was that "same-sex couples do not have the right to redefine marriage for the rest of us"
And now they have the Law to back them up on that...just like back in the Sixties when interracial marriage was denied. When it was perfectly normal to send a different racial group to the back of the bus, or to different schools, or to separate drinking fountains.
In 1967 when the US Supreme court said that Midred Jeter and Richard Loving, an interracial couple could marry, did that act really redifine marriage? Marriage was still marriage, that didn't change. What did change was that it redefined what it meant to be a citizen in this country.
This isn't an issue about the right to marry. This is an issue about who is and who is not considered an American citizen. Peel it apart, see it for what this really is.
Those against allowing same-sex marriage will justify their position with an argument that can be summarized as "The Bible says..."
ReplyDeleteAlthough it's questionable as to whether the Bible prohibits same-sex marriage or same-sex relationships (Biblical scholars do not agree on this point), the issue is that these opponents are trying to base a CIVIL and LEGAL definition of marriage on a RELIGIOUS basis. It is not enough for these opponents that their churches won't perform same-sex marriages -- they believe that everyone should hold to their religious tenets by codifying them into law.
The US Constitution specifies there should be a division between church and state, and no state-sanctioned religion. As a word to the wise, some countries don't have this division: Taliban-era Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and Iran for example. Americans don't believe these countries are examples that should be emulated -- yet the efforts of the Christian Right to create a "Christian" country in their image of "Christian" would, if allowed to continue unhampered, create a mirror image of what they most loathe.
When I asked someone, I got it's "amoral," and that America "has to put its foot down somewhere."
ReplyDeleteWhich is utterly ridiculous. How in the heck can love be amoral? It just makes me sick to my stomach.