Well, apparently we're all going to Hell in a handbasket.
A rainbow-colored handbasket.
This week, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that same-sex couples had a legal right to marry and effectively ended the state's ban on same-sex marriage. This ruling, theoretically, opens the door for gay marriage in the United States. I have one thing to say about that:
It's about time.
There's no good reason why two people of the same sex shouldn't be allowed to marry. This statement may come as a surprise to those who have labeled me a right-wing conservative. Allow me to explain.
First of all, gay people are people just like the rest of us. There is the tendency among conservatives to classify "the gays" as immoral, as sick, as somehow subhuman. A gay person falls in love just as readily as anyone, and desires to spend his or her life with someone with the same emotional intensity as any heterosexual person. Believe it or not, homosexuals are capable of marriage too, and judging by the divorce rate in this country, the United States would do well to spend its time fixing straight marriages instead of preventing gay ones.
A popular conservative argument is that marriage is a sacred institution, not to be polluted by same-sex coupling. But this idea of a "sacred institution" generally stems from religious beliefs. No one is saying that a lesbian couple should be allowed to get married in, say, a Catholic church. No one is trying to rewrite the Bible. The Massachusetts ruling in no way suggests that anyone has to alter their religious beliefs. But in this country, we have a separation of church and state, and according to the government, marriage is a legal, not a religious, institution. In the eyes of the law, there's nothing sacred about it.
It is also decidedly unfair that, in most cases, the lifelong partner of a gay employee receives none of the medical and other benefits from a company that a spouse normally would. This partner may need to have an operation normally covered by the health insurance of their significant other -- but alas, because they're not married, it doesn't happen. A woman who's married for two months, however, can reap the benefits of her husband's insurance. Yeah, that's fair.
How can we just sit back and deny these basic rights to someone? Isn't there a little passage in the Declaration of Independence that says that everyone is created equal? Doesn't this mean that we should all be treated equally, gay or straight?
A fear of the anti-gay contingent is that if we start allowing two people of the same sex to marry, pretty soon we'll have all sorts of problems, like three people wanting to get married, or someone wanting to marry their dog, or things of that nature.
This is just ridiculous. For one thing, I highly doubt that there will be a huge influx of people wanting to marry their dogs. For another, a marriage is, and will remain, between two people, and two people only. It simply shouldn't matter whether those two people are a man and a woman, two men, or two women.
There is also the argument that gay people choose to be gay, and therefore choose to live a gay life, and therefore choose to accept the consequences of that gay life. This is a tricky subject. There isn't yet any real, substantial, reliable evidence one way or the other. I personally believe homosexuality is not a choice, in which case it would be completely unfair to deny a homosexual the same rights as everyone else for something they can't help. However, I also do not deny that there are probably some people out there who have essentially chosen to be gay. Either way, because neither argument can be backed up by reliable evidence, it cannot be used to defend or to attack gay marriage.
Lastly, there is the simple argument that gay marriage is just wrong. Well, I'm sorry, but the "it's wrong" argument doesn't hold much water in today's world. I think abortion is wrong, but it's legal. Some people think premarital sex is wrong, but that's definitely legal. Why should some "wrong" things remain legal while others are not?
Homosexuality is not a crime. We should be worrying about things like terrorism, and al Qaeda, and our soldiers in Iraq, and not about the gay guy down the street that wants to get married.
Homosexuality makes people uncomfortable. That's understandable -- we're not used to it. You don't often see it portrayed in the media, and you don't often see two guys kissing in the street. But people were probably uncomfortable when slavery ended. People were probably uncomfortable with seeing African-Americans going to school, and holding jobs, and -- gasp -- eventually being treated as equal citizens. Just because something makes us uncomfortable doesn't mean it's a bad thing.
With all of the complaints thrown around today about racism, about sexism, about discrimination, we seemed to have overlooked the most oppressed group of all. Homosexuals are mocked, abused, and subject to discrimination. They can't even get married. It's about time we opened our eyes and started treating everyone, truly, as equals.
(Kristin Brown's column usually appears Wednesdays in the Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at kbrown@cavalierdaily.com.)
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