Rant: Gay Marriage
As time goes on, the debate over gay marriage makes less and less sense to me. Why is it even a question? There is no moral, legal, or even religious argument for why gay marriage should not be allowed within the law.
Here are some reasons why people argue against gay marriage, followed by why those reasons are not valid concerns.
- Gay marriage is against the Bible
Well that’s fine. No one is trying to force your church to hold a marriage ceremony for two people that it doesn’t agree with. If your argument is that gay marriage should be illegal because the Christian church (mostly) disagrees with it, I point you toward one of the founding principles of our country: the separation of church and state. - Gay marriage is wrong because it can’t produce offspring
If a woman is incapable of bearing children, should she be disallowed from getting married? I doubt you’d agree to that. Oh, but the barren woman could adopt, you say? Well then why not a gay couple? The argument for/against gay people being allowed to adopt is, I feel, a separate issue. However, undoubtedly you’ll say… - Gay people shouldn’t have kids because there is no father/mother figure
Then if a child’s father dies, and the mother doesn’t immediately re-marry, you absolutely must be in favor of taking the child away from the mother into protective services. What, you’re not in favor of that? That’s not the same? Yes it is. In fact, it’s an even worse situation for the child, if anything — at least with a gay couple, it is not a single-parent situation. - If we allow gay marriage, then what’s to stop us from allowing a man and his dog to get married?
Really? Does anyone seriously think that this argument holds water? They must, because I’ve seen it in so many places. Marriage is a legal contract between two people of age. Two people. If you can’t enter into a contract with something (which you can’t, with an animal), then you can’t marry it. Why is that so hard to understand?
The exact same arguments being made against gay marriage today were made against interracial marriage many years ago — it’s against the Bible, it’s immoral, it’s not good for the kids, most people are against it. Decades from now when gay marriage is allowed (I firmly believe it’s inevitable that it will be), the people who are giving those arguments against gay marriage will be looked upon the same way that we now look upon the people who gave those arguments against interracial marriage.
Honestly, I think the term “marriage” should be removed altogether from the law, in favor of civil unions for everyone. If John and Jane want to get married, that’s fine — the law recognizes it as a civil union, the same as if John and Dick want to do the same thing. Again, let’s remember that one of the concepts that this nation was founded on is the separation of church and state. Christianity should be treated no differently, where the government is concerned, than any other religion.