Government Should Not Regulate "Marriage"
About 2 weeks ago, I started writing a draft for a post about gay marriage--but it was awful. The prose was uninteresting, I was having trouble articulating my thoughts, and there was no flow to the post. So I abandoned it. But thanks to a recent letter written to the editor of The Capital, I can now let my views be known.
It's kind of long, so click below the fold to see the letter and my excellent commentary.
Crossposted on Annapolis Politics
This letter ran on Monday, but I am on blog backlog. Here we go:
Regarding the article headlined "Court upholds gay marriage ban":
I cannot figure out why there is opposition to gay marriage.
Allow me to enlighten you. A certain portion of the population thinks that homosexuality is wrong, thus they oppose gay marriage. Another part of the population, myself included, realizes that 'marriage' is a holy sacrament that can only be ministered through a church.
I do not understand why, in an ever-changing world, we do not allow all American citizens the same rights.
You have hit the nail on the head, but not for the reasons you think. The root of the gay marriage debate starts with the government's improper involvement in marriage in the first place.
I believe that marriage is a holy sacrament--a religious rite. The government has no more business issuing marriage licenses than it does licenses to receive your first Holy Communion or licenses to have a Bar Mitzvah.
So why does the government find it necessary to become involved in the marriage business? Because it's a convenient way to answer a lot of questions. In the eyes of the church, marriage is a holy partnership, but in the eyes of the government, it's just another contract--a social contract that allows for special tax treatment, denotes procedures if one partner dies, etc. Having a government issued marriage license is merely a safeguard for the legal system to minimize the possibility of confusion.
And AP has never understood why married couples enjoy special tax treatment. It makes no sense. If you have a kid, you can claim a dependent, but why should the act of getting married mean that the persons involved should pay any more or less than the sum of their individual tax liabilities?
I have a solution, or at least an improvement. The government can still issue social contracts, but they must not call them marriage licenses. They should not even be issuing marriage licenses to heterosexual couples. If two people want to live together, fine--they specify each other in their government-issued social contract and can receive preferential treatment*. If you and another person are raising a child, you should get the same treatment whether you are married and created the child, or you are homosexual and adopted the child, or you are related to the child but not its mother or father.
(*Heaven forbid the tax and legal systems would treat people the same, regardless of marital status, life-partner status, or any other status except how many dependents you are responsible for.)
Call the social contract whatever you want, but not marriage. Because marriage is a religious thing, and the goals that (I assume) homosexuals wish to achieve pertain to quality of life and fairness but have nothing to do with what marriage really is.
We all know that there is freedom of religion in this country. Religions determine their own qualifications for marriage, and the first qualification of marriage in every religion that I am aware of is that one person is male and the other is female, which is why there cannot be gay marriage.
I suppose the opponents think that being gay is a chosen path in life. why, when prejudices still exist, would anyone volunteer to be gay, to be discriminated against, to be ostracized, and to love someone but not be able to solidify that love in holy matrimony?
I actually think that the writer makes a good point in that nobody would make the choice to go through such purported agony. However, as I have explained above, you can live in legal matrimony but not holy matrimony. And while this may not seem like a difference to you, I can assure you on behalf of many people of faith that the distinction is important.
Gay couples are no different than heterosexual couples. They are committed to each other. They share responsibilities and life experiences. They simply respect and love each other.
Fantastic.
Yet, they struggle to be recognized in the states as married couples.
The next sentence that she writes contradicts the sentence she just wrote. Watch.....
Why is it up to the state legislature to define and measure love by sexual orientation?
This question is right on target. But, 2 sentences ago you just complained about states failing to recognize homosexual couples. Let me clear your mind for you...states should not recognize any marriages, homosexual or heterosexual. They can recognize social contracts through living wills, or any other legal crap, but not through marriage, because states are not religions.
It's no joke to say that the No. 1 reason for divorce is marriage.
You know, now that I think about it, the No. 1 reason for car accidents is cars. Down with Ford!!!!
Heterosexual couples have marital obstacles, but they do not have to endure the scrutiny and lack of marital legal protection that same-sex couples have to tolerate.
Broken record comment of the day: marriage should not convey any special legal protection. Marriage should be removed as a determining factor for legal and tax codes.
Some say marriage by same sex couples is immoral and would destroy societal family values.
This, of course, is an interesting proposition, but a propostion that I do not want to indulge at this time.
Advocating hatred and prejudice, not marriage between two people who are in love and committed to each other, is the real problem.
I would say that failure to separate church and state is the problem.
But what do I know?
Do you want me to answer that?
I'm just a confused, heterosexual, married mother of two trying to find an answer to why all Americans can't share in democracy, justice, fairness, liberty, and equality.
They can share in those things. However, not all Americans--whether gay or straight--can share in marriage because that has to be done through a church and not all people qualify.
Aren't these the ideals and values we should be teaching our children? Aren't they really what America is all about?
SAMANTHA HINER, Annapolis
Religious and moral issues are difficult to debate, because if you feel differently than another person, they think you are calling them an immoral pagan A-hole. People become defensive and even more entrenched in their positions. But hopefully this post will help to frame the gay marriage debate in a different light.
2 comments:
Your argument is an empty one, full of bloated privilege. Easy for you to say that the solution is for the government to get out of the marriage business. But that will never happen, because heterosexuals LOVE the legal privilege and protection that comes with civil marriage. Don't shift the argument by saying that the government should get out of the marriage business. The government is in the marriage business and as long as it is, there is no valid reason for excluding our families and children from the same protections that you already enjoy.
The whole issue is the use of the word "marriage" in both a legal and religious sense. It certainly seems like promoting two people who love each other to live together with legal benefits is desirable. It helps build a stable base for society in terms of person to person relationships, and is a lesson towards how we should treat other people. For those people who have children, it does the same thing for them - provides a hopefully stable parenting base within society. The many legal benefits provided to married couples should be available to all couples of legal age who accept the commitment, regardless of whether they are heterosexual or homosexual. And lets remember that in MD about 8000 gay/lesbian couples are raising children, and btw the American Pediatric Association says these children do as well in society as those from the much more common heterosexual families. And if there hadn't been good homes, sexuality not withstanding, many of those children might have been aborted.
Now, the religious marriage is a different thing. Churches are free to marry, or refuse to marry whomever they want, based on their beliefs. Refusals can be based on religion of the parties, even skin color, divorce history, or certainly heterosexual vs homosexual orientation. Religious marriage by itself does not confer any legal benefits, the benefits, e.g. sanctity of marriage, etc, are in the eyes of the believer.
So the whole issue, of gay marriage, while so complicated in the political sphere, should be simple. The state should issue LEGAL MARRIAGE licenses regardless of sexuality issues. This is nothing but an equal justice under the law issue for loving couples. The churches have the right to choose who they marry and refuse to marry, that is their right, and it should be stated explicitly in our laws.
The other part of the confusion comes because most people who have religious marriages also have civil marriages done at the same time. For my son in 2004, just the immediate family and the bride and groom went into an anteroom at the hotel. Legal contracts were signed, which our religious leader then said, acting only as a secular witness in this case "you are now married legally in the eyes of the government. Next we will go join the crowd of over 150 and hold the religious marriage ceremony, after which you will be married in the eyes of our religion".
So much heat and even venom has been spilled because of the confusion about religious marriage vs civil marriage. Fears by conservative churches that they would be forced to do gay marriages miss the point that that can't happen. The other big bad issue is the attempt by some conservative churches to dictate within our legal system who can and can't be married legally. This is the other side of church - state separation, where the ultimate question becomes 'which religion rules', and we need only to look at Sunni vs Shia in Iraq, with mass murders over minor religious differences. Also look at Saudi Arabia where Christians have actually been beheaded for trying to preach the Gospel and sell bibles, to understand what happens when matters of faith become matters of politics. And you can bet your last dollar that if religion hadn't taken over government in certain areas of the world, and turned their schools into houses of religious hatred for other cultures / religions, 9/11 would not have happened.
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