Sunday, February 29, 2004
(I Want To Marry An) Anglepoise Lamp
I hate to say it, cause it's all anti-democratic sounding and stuff, but when it comes to the dreaded Gay Marriage Question, public opinion should not be a factor.
This is a civil rights issue, and if we brought majority-rules politics into civil rights issues, well, there'd be no need for the Supreme Court and we certainly wouldn't have so many Amendments to the Constitution to remember when taking the AP US History Test (which I got a 5 on, by the way, so my opinion matters very, very much).
It's a simple question of whether we can allow the laws to once again become Seperate But Equal, whether we can live with creating another group of second-class citizens, and it only gets tricky when we bring religion into it.
We shouldn't bring religion into it, but we have to, because they started it. The fundamental misunderstanding here is that the Government is meddling in a religious institution. And it is, because marriage is a religious construct originally, but in governmental terms it's a social contract between two people, with certain rights and benefits granted to those who sign on. The government has been meddling in marriage ever since it put itself in charge of handing out the licenses, and some hard-line Church/State Seperators don't care for that in itself, but the benefits (thanks Atrios) make it a situation where civil rights are being offered to one group and not to another based on an arbitrary distinction (giving these rights to homosexuals via "Civil Unions" is, first of all, a clear-cut seperate-but-equal situation, and secondly, ridiculous. If it looks like a duck, and sounds like a duck, then let Rosie O'Donnell get hitched fer chrissakes).
So letting Adam and Steve get married in the governmental sense will have no effect on marriage in the religious sense, much like a divorce from Uncle Sam certainly won't satisfy Uncle John Paul II.
Hell, if it's an In Name Only disctinction, we can go ahead and call them Civil Unions, but if it doesn't delegitimize all straight, Christian marriages, I'm not interested.
Actually, I just want to see this guy get his way:
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This is a civil rights issue, and if we brought majority-rules politics into civil rights issues, well, there'd be no need for the Supreme Court and we certainly wouldn't have so many Amendments to the Constitution to remember when taking the AP US History Test (which I got a 5 on, by the way, so my opinion matters very, very much).
It's a simple question of whether we can allow the laws to once again become Seperate But Equal, whether we can live with creating another group of second-class citizens, and it only gets tricky when we bring religion into it.
We shouldn't bring religion into it, but we have to, because they started it. The fundamental misunderstanding here is that the Government is meddling in a religious institution. And it is, because marriage is a religious construct originally, but in governmental terms it's a social contract between two people, with certain rights and benefits granted to those who sign on. The government has been meddling in marriage ever since it put itself in charge of handing out the licenses, and some hard-line Church/State Seperators don't care for that in itself, but the benefits (thanks Atrios) make it a situation where civil rights are being offered to one group and not to another based on an arbitrary distinction (giving these rights to homosexuals via "Civil Unions" is, first of all, a clear-cut seperate-but-equal situation, and secondly, ridiculous. If it looks like a duck, and sounds like a duck, then let Rosie O'Donnell get hitched fer chrissakes).
So letting Adam and Steve get married in the governmental sense will have no effect on marriage in the religious sense, much like a divorce from Uncle Sam certainly won't satisfy Uncle John Paul II.
Hell, if it's an In Name Only disctinction, we can go ahead and call them Civil Unions, but if it doesn't delegitimize all straight, Christian marriages, I'm not interested.
Actually, I just want to see this guy get his way:
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