Gay Marriage Does Not Screw Up Marriage

http://thecollegeconservative.com/2012/02/22/3-reasons-the-9th-circuit-screwed-up-on-prop-8/

Many would claim that the recent ruling by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in California on Proposition 8’s constitutionality has set a precedent that will doom marriage by accepting same sex couples. This is not only untrue, but sensationalizing an issue that should not have been this contentious. If the federal government declares through an amendment in the future that, like bans in interracial marriage, amendments in the state constitutions that say marriage is only between a man and a woman are discriminatory and unconstitutional, this only makes gay couples equal in the eyes of civil law. Religions can still claim that those marriages are not ordained by God and refuse to officiate those ceremonies; their first amendment rights are protected even under such a declaration by the secular authorities. By no means would either secular or sacred marriage be destroyed or denigrated by the acceptance of gay marriage by society at large, except those who would prefer to stay in a previous generation, which is their right as long as they do not infringe upon those of others, such as the GLBT community when concerned with the supposed sanctity of marriage, which disappeared in cultural eyes when no fault divorce laws were passed. That sort of lazy approach to annulling marriages did more damage than gay marriage would ever do if passed across the country. Just because a religious definition of marriage is opposed by a secular law’s adjustment and allowance of gay people does not undermine or negate that definition in culture and society. It can remain, but by legal precedent, gays would be afforded the same title and rights, not merely the rights without the title, which is not solely the property of religion.

To begin with, gays are a suspect class by California law, so Prop 8 is explicitly conflicting with the Equal Protection Clause as it applies to state laws. It isn’t a stretch to claim that gay people are a suspect class on par with others that exist, such as race, ethnicity, religion, etc. Religion is not immutable except in terms of traditions it may hold canonically. People are not bound to their religion, but they are bound to race or ethnicity and by extension, since there is no evidence to suggest you are free to change sexual orientation or even alter it by force or so called “therapy”, it falls under one of the important qualifications of a suspect class in law, that it possesses an unchangeable characteristic. Other qualities include being persecuted and being unable to combat discrimination effectively by the legal process. For decades gays have been treated unequally in being denied the state of marriage while being given a compromise that is akin to saying one can have the duties of a soldier in the army, but not the title. One might say this is fair, but this would only be so if marriage was something that only had a religious implication. But the very association we have with marriage that entails property sharing, visitation rights, etc, makes it just as secular, if not more so, than the sanctity and holiness many believe it to possess. I believe it is very important, as close to sacred as one who doesn’t believe in the reality of the supernatural or transcendent could hold something in regard. But in order for marriage to be a fair practice, gays must be allowed to marry, and churches should be allowed to reject it, but not to legislate their religious perspective as law, since that more explicitly violates part of the constitution many people focus on only when it benefits them and not when it contrasts with what they take for granted, the free exchange of ideas which we may find offensive, but nonetheless tolerate the existence of.

Marriage does not have to mean the same thing to religious institutions as it does to the secular civil law, since they are not by necessity always in alignment with religious values, many of which can be antiquated and outdated. As noted before, there has always been, even back in the days before democratic republics with remote separation of church and state, an idea of marriage that connects the practice to property ownership, even if it was technically the woman that became the property of the man instead of sharing the property with her husband. Considering we can even think of a nuance between marriage of the state and marriage of the church, even if they also overlap in a sense, should be evidence enough that marriage is not something strictly for religion to define or legislate through the process of the courts. And arguments based on historical precedent only presume marriage will always be the same way it has been for thousands of years on the same faulty premise that the family will always remain as it was back in the old days, which is very much not the case. It used to be that your extended family shared a home with you, but we’ve progressively separated from that practice in the U.S., not to mention you can have families that are across countries through the use of technology, sharing their moments together without being physically with each other, not that it isn’t done with nuclear families in relation to immediate family if they are especially distant from each other. But the family can be a group of people completely unrelated to each other. Foster parents, adoptive parents, etc, all of which emphasize that family is not about blood relation, as defenders of so called “family values” and “traditional marriage” that “protects children” claim, but is about the sentiment behind the group or pairing in the cases of family and marriage respectively. The love is what makes a family or a marriage, not whether you are biologically connected or whether you can biologically have children together. This is irrelevant, even if it is a common occurrence in both cases. The most basic and essential part of both of these is love and for people to judge otherwise is to nitpick beyond even the biggest comic book nerd and forget the spirit of the institution for the body of the institution as it was in idealized history.

The state does not have a legitimate or compelling interest for denying the right to marriage in a civil context to people that, as noted above, are both a minority and being persecuted for something they cannot change without severe psychological repercussions. Denying marriage to people who are biologically related or to entities which cannot consent, such as children and pets, is a compelling interest because of either risks to the children or violation of children and pet liberties in contrast to denying marriage to a couple that can consent and poses no risks to their children. Any alleged studies about children raised by gay parents being likely to be gay does not show causation necessarily, but only a correlation that might coincidentally exist. Gay marriage is not something that has any explicit danger and so called predictions of disaster in two generations for any country that has seem to want to focus on the moralizing objections they have instead of whether a country is mismanaged apart from its acceptance of homosexuality, which certain groups find abhorrent, but nonetheless have not brought forth evidence that gay parents or couples adopting and getting married are any problem for the world at large. Without this, your opposition is religious in nature and trying to legalize it based on that violates the establishment clause on its face by American standards and a general idea of church/state separation across the world in one form or another.

It’s not that you can’t oppose gay marriage. No one’s stopping religious people from finding it objectionable. They just can’t use the law to try to make their discrimination legal in any sense. Like bans on interracial marriage, there are no grounds for banning gay marriage except that it makes people uncomfortable or morally indignant, which is not any rational reason to criminalize or prevent something from being protected by law, such as abortion, alcohol or cigarettes, all of which have opponents, but nonetheless have become commonplace and legally protected, though not considered moral by all people. This sort of distinction between legality as moral permissibility and legal as morally objectionable might have the potential for hypocrisy or abuses by humanity, but the intent behind them is not so sinister as abortion opponents try to spin the issue of what they mistakenly calling murder. Like gay marriage, abortion might have morally problematic qualities, but it is not something that poses a threat on the level of rape, murder or other such things that are illegal by their very nature. Same sex couples getting both the rights and title of marriage will not ruin your marriage and will not corrupt the youth into all becoming gay, since, as science is slowly showing, we are not able to change our sexual orientation or attraction so simply as we can change our beliefs concerning the supernatural, for example. So why should we discriminate based on the former and protect the latter under constitutional principles? We shouldn’t, and I don’t think even the founding fathers would have wanted the government to stay silent on this. Like the issue decades ago with bans on people of different races marrying each other, the government should step in so as to protect this fundamental right that, while not explicit in the Constitution, is clearly integral to our society. Opening it to one group of people with a compelling reason and no imminent danger to others or themselves will not lead to legalizing other marriages so easily. This fear based rhetoric is keeping us behind other countries making leaps and bounds of progress on many social issues. Shouldn’t we focus on love, especially if it is conducive to other values we tend to hold in common, such as responsibility and fidelity? Until next time Namaste and aloha.

Gay Marriage Does Not Make Anarchy

http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/06/16/new.york.gay.marriage.tyree/index.html

Finally I’m returning to what many would find a common topic I covered in my blog’s earlier days, GLBT issues. A former Super Bowl champion, David Tyree of the New York Giants, is now using his voice as an athlete to influence people against legislation of a same sex marriage bill in New York (which passed, not surprisingly). His first words on the subject were that it would lead to ‘anarchy’. But he later qualified that he meant lawlessness in a sense of moral relativism. Problem with that is he’s making a slippery slope argument. Just because we expand the definition of marriage to include a man and a man or a woman and a woman as couples does not make people start thinking they can steal and murder people and get away with it. The fact that he thinks people will become more immoral because they don’t have a proper nuclear family is also pretty misguided. He seems to be quite a “moral” person, albeit more moralistic than moral in this instance, but he lived in a single parent household most of his life. The lack of a steady family life isn’t the only factor that can affect a person’s morals and beliefs. Simply being exposed to a community or a faith that is compelling enough can draw out a person’s “moral fabric” (as he so “eloquently” put it) even if they’re an orphan. In short, moral development is relatively distinct from one’s family background or lack thereof in the cases of orphaned children. Even children adopted by gay couples don’t necessarily become more immoral and aren’t even more likely to become gay themselves.

All these fears are unfounded by any real evidence and instead rely on the mere possibility. Instead of seeing the reality in front of us, that gay people are in committed relationships and are not all in the stereotypes and prejudices we might have about them, people persist in believing that they aren’t like straight people, so they don’t deserve marriage, which is somehow reserved only for straight people. Marriage as an institution hasn’t existed as a singular form. If one goes back far enough, polygyny, where a man could have multiple wives, was permissible. And interracial marriage was considered taboo for centuries as well even when marriage became commonly monogamous. Not to mention that even if we assume that marriage between one man and one woman was the more common form of coupling, there weren’t the same rights for a woman as for the man. Women were simply married into the male’s household and had fewer responsibilities, stuck as a domestic, taking care of the children while the man was even free in certain societies to take a concubine. Marriage has evolved over time and to say that it has remained exactly the same as it is now back through history is not only ignorant, but so myopic as to make you appear foolish.

Even if women in marriages across the world have rights that are equal to their husband in terms of the law, divorces and the like, they didn’t always. Divorce wasn’t even an option for women until a certain period in history and only men could file for divorce under any legal system before that. Marriage has always been evolving in some way through history and merely allowing faithful couples of the same sex to get married and have the same rights and title of marriage will not make married couples feel less special or make the children of those marriages through adoption or the like be more prone to immorality or homosexuality than children of straight couples, which does happen.

A lot of the difficulties that exist with this singular example blown out of proportion by a moderately educated but nonetheless self righteous athlete can be solved by pointing out that at least 5 other states have already accepted gay marriage as equal to straight marriage: Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Iowa and the District of Columbia. Of course, people can allege that U.S. society is getting worse since those things have happened, but they’d be no better than Westboro Baptist Church is when saying that God is punishing people for accepting homosexuality. Do you really want to have yourself compared so easily to one of the most hateful groups in the United States, which has also been banned from the U.K. last I heard? I didn’t think so. Instead, people try to distance themselves by saying this isn’t because of their religious beliefs and they don’t want a theocracy of any sort. But if you want to enforce this sort of discrimination against same sex couples just because it makes you feel uncomfortable, then you’ve already missed the point of minority protection put forth by the 9th amendment of the U.S. Constitution. I personally wouldn’t see a problem with even polygamists being allowed to have marriage rights, as long as there were provisions about how the money is divided up and shared, since there could be potential abuses not present with a two spouse home that would exist in both gay and straight marriages between two people.

If you are afraid of anarchy because a 7th state in the U.S. legislates gay marriage as legal, you neither understand anarchy nor do you have any evidence except speculative hypotheses about any sort of causation of immorality resulting from legislation and acceptance of same-sex marriage. All you could really argue this point of immorality connected to acceptance of homosexuality from is a slippery slope argument or questionable relationships of correlation and causation. If legislating gay marriage made people more evil, wouldn’t we see crime rates go up in those areas? And even if they did, how can you prove that those people were committing crimes because of gay marriage? Are you really claiming that either people in straight marriages or children raised in gay marriages are somehow going to become worse people because of either gay marriage being legal or because they are raised by a gay couple? There’s far too much of a relation of causation being claimed here between marriage and morality. Marriage does not lead to morality, nor does morality require marriage in any strict sense. I’m surprised that this is the only thing a football player can do. You’ve won the Superbowl, so you’d at least have some accomplishment to go with for coaching or something else. At least you’re not like Carrie Prejean, who’s probably been on her own tirade about gay marriage herself since she got runner up in Miss U.S.A. a few years ago.

Of course the legislation has long since been passed in New York, so I say bring on the anarchy if it happens, which it won’t.  So until next time, Namaste and aloha.

The Moral Generation Gap

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/06/09/survey-millennials-echo-parents-on-abortion-much-more-supportive-of-gay-marriage/

http://www.christianpost.com/news/report-millennials-views-on-abortion-gay-marriage-influenced-by-media-experience-51054/

I’ve referenced the term millenial before, in “Transformations in Trends In Transition of Christianity”, as an identification of my own generation, those born in the 1980s and coming of age in the 2000s. This time, the reference is on more general issues, probably the two most contentious these days: abortion rights and gay marriage.

The results of a study by the Public Religion Research Institute suggest that there is some generational stability with the issue of pro life in terms of both moral and legal concerns, but that neither the moral nor legal problems about gay marriage seen by parents of millenials have transferred as well. There is a slight difference in terms of millenial’s beliefs about abortion’s morality, 50% believing it is wrong, less than half of the study believing it is morally acceptable, contrasting with a 54% moral opposition by their parents and a similar contrast morally supporting it. However, there seems to be no difference between the number of middle aged and young adults concerning whether abortion should be legal. If the 60-70% figure for millenials is any indication, it would seem that the legality and availability of abortion are both accepted by the generations almost equally. The difference is between one’s personal moral dis/agreement with abortion and one’s public permission of abortion as a practice, regardless of if they agree or disagree with abortion morally. This at least shows that people are still able to distinguish between the privacy of one’s moral beliefs and the limit to which you can force those moral beliefs on others as legislation. It makes me feel confident about the state of abortion’s legality in my generation’s perspective and in the future.

Gay marriage, on the other hand, is where the generations strongly diverge. Millenials are now around 60% in stating that homosexual behavior is morally acceptable, only 40% saying it is morally wrong, whereas their parents are the inverse of that, finding gay sex immoral around 60% of the time, only 40% or so finding it permissible. The survey also spoke on the differences between millenials and their parents on whether gay marriage should be legal, and it seems more millenials are supportive of gay marriage as legal in the United States, compared to their parents, where only about a quarter of that generation seems to support gay marriage.

The study’s focus was moreso on the abortion issue, reflecting that while support for the legality of abortion has gone up slightly with millenials, they have remained consistent with their parents’ age group in their beliefs about abortion’s morality. The actual gap that is significant exists with gay marriage, speaking on people’s increasing belief that people should be able to marry whomever they desire, regardless of if they are the same gender/sex, and it should be legal across the country even if you might disagree with it, since there is some overlap of moral permission and legal permission among millenials, no doubt.

There are predictions, however, from people such as Tony Perkins, notorious for his opposition to gay marriage and support of so-called family values (and also whined that the words “Under God” were taken out of the pledge at the NBC World Open golf tournament), that millenials will change their mind about gay marriage once they have children of their own. This is little more than him propagating paranoia to parents and children to either make them feel better or reconsider their position in the future respectively. The notion that once you get married and/or have a family (because you can have a family without being married) that you’ll suddenly be opposed to same sex couples having the same rights as you is a predictor of stupidity, which I would hope people are increasingly less likely to be when we get past stereotypes and stigma about gay people and get to know them as people. If I get married and then a gay couple gets married, it affects my straight marriage in no way, shape or form. Heck, it’s not even remotely possible that I’d suddenly start questioning whether marriage is a good thing just because a small group of committed monogamous couples who are gay happen to also have the same title.

If anything, there seems to be a consistent notion of tradition that you can maintain your private morals and opposition to something but at the same time, tolerate its existence under legal parameters, such as abortion not being on demand, but having a process. As many have put it, from Planned Parenthood to Bill Clinton (right?), “Abortion should be safe, legal and rare,” I can’t say I’m surprised, considering abortion is a much more emotionally charged subject than gay marriage these days. Part of the combined skepticism of traditional marriage and acceptance of non-traditional gay marriage is theorized to be due to children of this generation experiencing all the more evidently the problems with straight marriage or at least the apparent lack of success around 50% or so of couples’ experience. But I somehow doubt that just because some people have had experience directly with straight marriages failing or are skeptical of people’s capacity to remain faithful to each other, that they will be more likely to support gay marriage. Supporting gay marriage is about whether you think people deserve equal opportunity to marry, regardless of sexual orientation. Just supporting the rights of gay people to marry doesn’t mean you think straight marriage has any less value. They are equal in their willingness to commit, only different in their sexual biology.

With abortion, however, it becomes more difficult because of the associated argument that every person is alive today because of pro life sentiments. But this isn’t true either. Every person is alive today because their parents made a choice for life, but at the same time, have no doubt experience with people who have had to make decisions on whether to abort a child for a variety of reasons. The fact that this is somewhat more common these days indicates to me that this tendency for people to personally disagree with something, but have the decency to say that people deserve to have the option to abort depending on circumstances won’t disappear easily. And in that sense many people seem to have been able to separate their private and public spheres, allowing people basic inalienable rights, but nonetheless holding a pride in their own beliefs as long as they are not infringing on rights that they themselves would not want infringed upon.  It’s certainly better than it used to be, from what I understand of abortion legislation history. But history always seems to at least progress in some way forward, from Roe v. Wade onward for abortion’s legality and persistence thereof. So until next time, Namaste and aloha.