Gay Marriage

I've decided I'm going to start all my posts like Jerry Seinfeld:
WHAT is UP with Gay Marriage?

OK, maybe not. But, honestly, what is up? I don't see how the anti-gay-marriage folks have a leg to stand on. Let's break down their arguments, shall we? We'll start off easy:

God says homosexuality is a sin
First off, even that premise is up for debate. I will most likely get into a more detailed analysis in a later post, but for starters the Bible doesn't even mention lesbians. But even assuming that God cares what consenting adults do in their own bedrooms, since when have we passed laws based on Scripture? We don't. There are no laws against divorce or working on Sunday. There's no law enforcing the beatitudes. There ARE specific laws ensuring the rights of non-Christians, including atheists. God's Law is not federal.

Allowing gay marriage would be an unprecedented redefinition of an ancient tradition
Do you know which definition of marriage has the longest tradition? The one where two families haggle over a political and financial contract, and the wife, often a teen-aged girl or younger, is chattel. The most revolutionary redefinition of marriage was when it became something that two adults chose for themselves out of love (or something like it). "Traditional marriage" as we know it in the United States today is only about 100 years old. Not much of a tradition, and certainly not an iron-clad one. In reality, the "definition" of marriage has been pretty fluid throughout history and across societies. The only thing that has remained constant is that it is the convention by which we as a society recognize the creation of a new family. Gay marriage will certainly not change that.

Gay marriage threatens straight marriage
Huh? This doesn't even make any sense. For me, the strength of my marriage is based on the strength of the bond between me and my husband. It has nothing to do with other people or what their marriages look like. The strength of individual marriages shouldn't depend on what anybody else is doing. If your straight marriage is so fragile that the nice gay couple down the street gettin' hitched is somehow a threat, you might want to consider looking for a divorce lawyer regardless.

Marriage is about children, and homosexuals can't have kids
Wrong on both counts. Marriage is not fundamentally about children and it never has been. As mentioned above, it has historically been a business transaction. But even now we don't bar infertile couples or post-menopausal women from marrying, nor do we require all fertile married couples to procreate. And plenty of gay couples have kids. They have them in the same ways straight couples often do: adoption, artificial insemination, surrogacy and/or having them from a previous marriage. If you care at all about families, you should know that the children of gay parents deserve the stability of the institution of marriage.

But what about the children?
I was going to do a section on the "children need both a mother and a father" misconception, but when I looked online to find sources I was pleased to find that most new studies claim that lesbians actually make better moms! Go ahead, Google it. But I'd like to break down the old argument anyway. The studies that "prove" that kids "do best" with a mom and a dad are based on data comparing straight, two-parent homes with single-mother homes. Hmmmm, let me see if I can find the fallacy in that logic... Don'cha think that the number of parents might be more important than the gender, maybe? One of these so-called scientists, Dr. A. Dean Byrd, also came out with a study which "detailed the significant physical and emotional health risks of those who identify as homosexuals, including a reduced lifespan, suicidality, drug and alcohol abuse, depression, and domestic violence." Once again he completely disregards context and confuses correlation for causation. You know who also had an increased risk for reduced lifespan, suicidality, drug and alcohol abuse, depression, and domestic violence? Black people in the Jim Crow south. These "studies" are a joke.

Gay people already can get all the rights married people have
This may be partially to mostly true in some states, but so what? Separate but equal is not equal. I never quite understood what a big deal this was until one of my friends started detailing for me all the money she had to spend and red tape she had to go through in order to change her last name, get power of attorney for her partner, list her partner as their son's parent, etc. All the things that were free and easy for me as a married person were expensive, difficult and time-consuming for her and her partner. It's absolutely unfair and completely pointless.

It's a slippery, slippery slope
This one has always bugged me, but only recently did I fully understand why. I can't remember the source (thank goodness this is just a rant and not a scholarly paper!), but I read somewhere an analysis of why this argument is deeply misogynistic. The argument usually goes, "Well, if a man can marry another man, what's going to stop him from marrying his dog!" Hardee-har-har. But notice, it's never a woman marrying her dog. That's because the underlying supposition is that marriage is something a man does, and that the consent of the partner is irrelevant. How insulting. Once you realize that marriage is an agreement between consenting individuals, the slippery-slope, beastiality, pedophelia arguments become silly. I suppose that technically polygamy and incest are still on the table, but since historically both of those things have also involved lack of consent from one (or more) parties, they still cannot be logically compared to gay marriage.

Marriage is a sacrament and churches shouldn't be forced to allow gay marriage
This one actually makes some sense to me. Freedom to practice one's own religion is a right I hold dear. It is regrettable that our society has so entangled the civil institution of marriage with the religious sacrament. If it were possible to revoke ALL civil marriages and replace them with civil unions, leaving marriage to the religions, I would support that in a heartbeat. But that's not going to happen; they are too tightly linked and "marriage" shows up in our laws too much. But as I stated before, separate but equal is not equal, so I feel we have no choice but to legalize gay marriage with the caveat that various religions are protected and can continue to make their own rules about who they will or will not marry. Seeing as the Catholic Church still doesn't allow women to be priests, I am hopeful that the religious protection will stand.

Seriously, what about the children?!
The silliest, and newest, argument against gay marriage has something to do with what kids are taught in schools. Seriously? You guys are really grasping at straws, now. How do you make the connection between legal gay marriage and being forced to give kindergartners graphic details about homosexual sex? There is no connection. In my high school sex ed class, which was pretty comprehensive I'm happy to say, there was no "how to" component. Yes, we were taught about various sex acts, but only so we could learn the relative risks of each; it was never graphic or detailed. And unless you gays and lesbians are holding out on something really spectacular, we covered everything in my "straight" sex ed class, anyway. As for kids being taught in school that being gay is OK as part of some larger discussion about what marriage is, we never had a "marriage" unit in any class I ever took. I honestly can't recall ever discussing the definition of marriage in school. Teachers don't teach kids about what marriage is, so that's a moot point.

OK. I'm done. Any arguments I didn't think of?

Listen: we live in a country where individual freedoms are held sacred. That means that there are a lot of things other people are free to do that I might not like very much. But I will fight for your right to participate in a KKK march or wear a thong in public because, no matter how disgusting I personally find it, you have the right to do those things. You should have the right to do those things. Gay marriage doesn't hurt anyone. Legalizing gay marriage would help so many families already living in the United States right now. Everyone should have the right to marry the person they love.