Equal Before The Law

Gay marriage is inevitable. You may as well try and hold the tide back with a broom, although many are attempting just such foolishness. Those who do so would argue that they are protecting their rights, but they are merely protecting their privileges. Beyond the holy matrimony sort of marriage, which cannot be regulated by the federal government due to the first amendment, we're talking about marriage as a legal contract. That legal contract is obtained at City Hall, so it's pretty clear the government licenses marriage. If you're wondering why civil unions, or some other facsimile of marriage, are not a sufficient answer to the gay marriage question, the answer is very simple. No legal contract can be equal to a marriage because marriage involves over 1,000 advantages that are both the law of the land and unavailable outside of marriage. Shall we say that marriage and civil unions are separate but equal? Apart from the fact that that phrase, and its unsavory implications, will be familiar to anyone with a working knowledge of the history of civil rights in the United States, the equal part is false. By false, I mean as objectively and scientifically false as 2+2=5. So let's have no patronizing nonsense about how civil unions are enough for gay couples and that they should be happy with them. Only people who are not gay themselves or have no gay person in the world for whom they care could ever reach that conclusion. We cannot proceed in offering special advantage to heterosexual marriage without condemning homosexuals to inequality before the law. By what reason shall the opponents of gay marriage deny their fellow Americans rights that they themselves enjoy? All the reasoning for heterosexual marriages to be sanctioned and licensed by the state applies to homosexual ones. Couples of any kind want to make sure they can visit their relatives in the hospital, be protected in the event of divorce, have access to the privileged nature of spousal conversation, be granted access to assets in the event of untimely death, and have the custodial rights available to any spouse in that last case as well. These are just a few of the things, off the top of my head, that gay couples want and deserve just as much as straight ones.

Some opponents of gay marriage aren't so much concerned with the legal as they are with the moral and emotional. Okay, let's talk about that. Specifically, let's talk about babies and bathwater. You may recall when Britney Spears married Jason Allen Alexander in Las Vegas. This marriage lasted 55 hours and was later annulled. Compare this with the best possible hypothetical gay marriage. Both partners love one another, stay together until they're old, grey, and have trouble hearing one another, and adopt and raise children together. Is it possible to call that relationship less holy and sanctified than Ms. Spears' Vegas wedding, which her management later described as, "A joke that was taken too far," and, if so, is it even possible to conceive of anything more arrogant? Don't use that old chestnut about straight marriage being good for society either. These relationships and legal contracts are like anything else, which is to say that they are all unique and run the gamut from good, bad, and indifferent for society. Knowing my own mother and father as I do, I can report that they're both reasonable people who have found happiness in marriage, just not with one another. Believe me, that marriage was not good for society and it was not good for them in any sense beyond that of a useful test of one another's reserves of patience. Still think straight marriages are better for raising kids? I wonder how the parenting skills of the married Andrea Yates (drowned her children), married Marvin Gay Sr. (shot his legendary musician son) , and married Anna Nicole Smith (her son Daniel killed himself at 20) would stack up against the married Rosie O'Donnell, the married Dan Savage, or the married Ricky Martin. If any of these married gay parents' children were drowned, shot, or committed suicide, Google is unaware of the fact. As would seem to be common sense, good parenting is a combination of means, sanity, and responsibility. Plenty of gay couples, many of whom would certainly be married already if not unequal before the law, would love to adopt the teeming masses of children born to teen moms, doomed to an upbringing by abusive subhumans, or simply orphaned. Who are you to sit in judgment of those who seek only to adopt children most straight married couples would probably not? What arrogance resides within you that you would let a child live in misery rather have a good home with people who happen to be homosexual?

In my closing paragraph here, I'd like to talk about change and how it's difficult. Believe me, change is pretty tough for autistics, so, in some sense, if you're an opponent of gay marriage, I know what you're going through. As I've outlined here, your ideas are simply wrong and will share the fate that all bad ideas face in time. That I cannot relate to and can offer you no comfort regarding. What I can relate to and can offer comfort regarding is in a general sense that change is always difficult, whether it's good, bad, or indifferent. To no end in Springfield, I am plagued by road construction that forces me to alter my route to any number of places, which often included my former workplace. At one time, this forced me to take several blocks south, take a side street several blocks west, and then take another side street several blocks north, which was all because a stoplight was being replaced. Pain is a part of change, but, at least with change that is a matter of design, so, usually, is gain. Surely, this stoplight would've stopped working in some regard at some point in the near future and, while I may have been inconvenienced for several weeks, I probably will never know how glad I am to have that stoplight still working today. Change means pain in the short-term, but gain in the long-term, basically. It may be painful for those fond of tradition to see gay married couples bringing up children, sharing a marriage as recognized and advantageous as a traditional one, and as free as any straight couple to go make a bad decision on the Vegas strip officiated over by a lesbian Elvis impersonator, but that change is coming. Don't worry about marriage losing its meaning because that's a battle you've already lost a long time ago. Annulments, no-fault divorce, the aforementioned Elvis impersonator-type weddings, online ordination certificates, and so on have long since made a mockery of traditional marriage and all the things it was supposed to stand for. Lots of good things are present in the concept of traditional marriage, but there are bad things there too, and we, as a society, have already gotten used to ideas like, oh, say, marital rape being something that's actually illegal. We must evolve as a society and must keep asking whether or not what we're doing is right. Denying homosexuals the right to marry isn't right and, while I dislike the man who popularized the phrase, making them equal before the law is change I can believe in.

-Frank