Wednesday, March 17, 2004
Gay couples who get married are traditionalists.
Gay couples who get married are traditionalists. People who oppose gay marriages are also traditionalists. But if the latter really want to preserve the civil institution of marriage with "Defense of Marriage" laws, then write those laws to make it more difficult to get divorced. Unless they want to concede that it's an American "tradition" for 50% of heterosexual marriages to end in divorce. & after that, find a way of stopping the common heterosexual practice of cohabitation - that discourages marriage, too. & when children are born to cohabitating couples, they are raised in untraditional households, as opposed to being raised by single & divorced mothers (many of them lesbians), which is traditional in America. (When I was a child, lesbians constituted a significant percentage of grammar school teachers & nobody seemed to mind. My 4th grade teacher, a fiftyish Miss Olsen, encouraged me to write poetry. I adored her. )
What about the married couples who embrace a "swinger's" lifestyle? Surely some of these couples hire a babysitter on the nights they go to the "club" here in town, discreetly entering via the back door of the building. It's a legal business. A "Defense of Marriage" law ought to explain why the lifestyles of these parents - who advocate adultery & engage in consenting sexual acts with opposite & same sex partners or in mixed group orgies - require legal protection against a nefarious immoral assault on "traditional" marriage by monogamous gay couples? Well, lets poll those swingers on the issue of gay marriage. You think many of them would object? Of course not, because the "sodomy" laws prohibiting some very pleasurable & common consensual sexual acts that have been challenged & overturned by the gay rights movement also applied to heterosexuals. Interracial marriages were once illegal in most states. Inter-faith unions, though not illegal, carried the taint of moral approbation, & still do in many religious communities
To the State, marriage is strictly a civil matter: government has no special interest in the morality of a legal marriage, or in the religious basis of the union. The State cares if children are abused or spouses are assaulted, but laws covering these are based upon dangerous, anti-social behavior, not marriage. Child custody is determined by a complex number of factors, which may or may not involve marriage. Marriage laws are concerned with matters of property & money. To be legally married, you need a license, & you need someone the State deems qualified to adminster the oath - an official appointed by law, a ship captain under certain conditions, an ordained leader in a nonprofit organization that is recognized as a "religion' - & you need witnesses. If you can get these people to just sign the document, you can dispense with the ceremony & the State will be none the wiser, nor will it care. But if you have a clergyperson perform the ceremony without a license, you ain't legally hitched.
I can find no reason why, in a society in which civil marriage is separated from religion & is defined as a legal contract, why that contract is permitted only to a man & a woman. It is an injustice. Let the religious denominations prohibit same sex marriages among their believers, if they can, just as they might prohibit the consumption of alcohol or pork, or card-playing & dancing, or the observance of Halloween. This is no concern of the State unless coercion is involved. But when the right to a legal, secular marriage contract is denied to any two people over the age of consent, that is a clearly a prejudicial violation of human rights, just as if it were two atheists being discriminated against instead two men or two women.
It's not like we're going backward. New Jersey has a new domestic partnership law, which was passed on the initiative of Democrats & signed by Gov. Jim McGreevey last January, going into effect this July. Such a progressive advance will lead inevitably, I believe, to the legalization of gay marriages in this state within a few years, provided the homophobic Republican right doesn't scare the nation into passing absurd laws, or even worse, a dangerous Constitutional Amendment. The best tactic now is to let these local gay marriages, in Asbury Park & elsewhere, play out through the courts one way or another - the movement won't be hurt there - but to fight relentlessly against the enactment of repressive new laws, giving domestic partnership a chance to prove that the arrangement will have no effect on anyone who isn't gay or over the age of 62.
The Small Print: Iraq Casualties 3/9/04 - 3/15/04: 12 dead, 73 wounded
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
What about the married couples who embrace a "swinger's" lifestyle? Surely some of these couples hire a babysitter on the nights they go to the "club" here in town, discreetly entering via the back door of the building. It's a legal business. A "Defense of Marriage" law ought to explain why the lifestyles of these parents - who advocate adultery & engage in consenting sexual acts with opposite & same sex partners or in mixed group orgies - require legal protection against a nefarious immoral assault on "traditional" marriage by monogamous gay couples? Well, lets poll those swingers on the issue of gay marriage. You think many of them would object? Of course not, because the "sodomy" laws prohibiting some very pleasurable & common consensual sexual acts that have been challenged & overturned by the gay rights movement also applied to heterosexuals. Interracial marriages were once illegal in most states. Inter-faith unions, though not illegal, carried the taint of moral approbation, & still do in many religious communities
To the State, marriage is strictly a civil matter: government has no special interest in the morality of a legal marriage, or in the religious basis of the union. The State cares if children are abused or spouses are assaulted, but laws covering these are based upon dangerous, anti-social behavior, not marriage. Child custody is determined by a complex number of factors, which may or may not involve marriage. Marriage laws are concerned with matters of property & money. To be legally married, you need a license, & you need someone the State deems qualified to adminster the oath - an official appointed by law, a ship captain under certain conditions, an ordained leader in a nonprofit organization that is recognized as a "religion' - & you need witnesses. If you can get these people to just sign the document, you can dispense with the ceremony & the State will be none the wiser, nor will it care. But if you have a clergyperson perform the ceremony without a license, you ain't legally hitched.
I can find no reason why, in a society in which civil marriage is separated from religion & is defined as a legal contract, why that contract is permitted only to a man & a woman. It is an injustice. Let the religious denominations prohibit same sex marriages among their believers, if they can, just as they might prohibit the consumption of alcohol or pork, or card-playing & dancing, or the observance of Halloween. This is no concern of the State unless coercion is involved. But when the right to a legal, secular marriage contract is denied to any two people over the age of consent, that is a clearly a prejudicial violation of human rights, just as if it were two atheists being discriminated against instead two men or two women.
It's not like we're going backward. New Jersey has a new domestic partnership law, which was passed on the initiative of Democrats & signed by Gov. Jim McGreevey last January, going into effect this July. Such a progressive advance will lead inevitably, I believe, to the legalization of gay marriages in this state within a few years, provided the homophobic Republican right doesn't scare the nation into passing absurd laws, or even worse, a dangerous Constitutional Amendment. The best tactic now is to let these local gay marriages, in Asbury Park & elsewhere, play out through the courts one way or another - the movement won't be hurt there - but to fight relentlessly against the enactment of repressive new laws, giving domestic partnership a chance to prove that the arrangement will have no effect on anyone who isn't gay or over the age of 62.
The Small Print: Iraq Casualties 3/9/04 - 3/15/04: 12 dead, 73 wounded
