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I just can't understand the people who can't understand marriage equality. I just don't know why so many people have a big harity problem with same-sex marriage. Why do people get all apocalyptic when asked to be tolerant and accepting of what other folk want to do?
OK, so what is marriage anyway? Well, it depends on who you ask.There are two right answers here. If you ask a Catholic priest, they will say that marriage is the sacrament matromony, a union between a man and a woman for the purpose of procreation and mutual support, or love. It is a union between a man and a woman before God.
However, if you ask a civil rights attorney, they will tell you, that marriage is a legal partnership contract between two people. Marriage is a special class of legal contract that is recognized by and registered with the state. Many different laws, federal, state and local, apply to this special class of contract. Most of these laws deal with the ownership, transmission and dispossition of property betweencontract participants, including a special class of participant: children.
Note: in the former case, marriage is all about a union before God. In the latter case, God isn't mentioned. Civil marriage is all about the disposition of property, especially as regards the welfare of children.
In counties where there is a state religion, you get married by the church and the state gets a copy. In this country, we have separation of church and state, so many people are married by judges or justices of the peace -- they get married in a court room or a registry office. If you get married in a church, you still have to get a marriage license from the state. The marriage, in a legal sense, has nothing to do with the church you got married in. It is the same partnership whether you were married by a Justice of the Peace or an Archbishop.
The state is a the final arbiter of who can and cannot get married. A good example of this is the Mormon church, which for many years condoned and encouraged polygamy, which the US government called bigamy and ruled illegal. Any church can make its own rules about who can and who cannot get married. Many churches have done so. For example, many churches refused to marry people of different races until very recently. Many churches refuse to sanction the marriage of a man to his brother's widow, which is often perfectly legal, provided that the man and said widow are not also closely related by blood (in which case the marriage from which the woman was made a widow would have been illegal, too).
But we don't see all kinds of major press coverage because the state allows marriage between people whom various churchs say can't get married, unless they happen to be of the same sex. Why is that? It is not because legalizing same sex marriages will change the rules for any church one bit. It is because some people of some religions believe that same sex marriage is wrong, specifically that it is a sin.
And there used to be lots of laws like that. You weren't allowed to open a store on Sunday, not even a gas station in some places because to break the Sabbath by engaging in trade was a sin. The laws against same-sex marriage are just laws against what some people call a sin.
But many people do not think it is a sin. Many people think it is wrong to penalize people because some group of people considers what they are doing to be a sin. There is a large religious minorty in this coutnry that considers eating any form of shellfish a sin. Would it be right to outlaw oysters, mussels, and lobster because of their opinion? Some churches still think interracial marriage is a sin. Should we prohibit interracial marriage for the same reason as same-sex marriage?
And then there are all those laws and special rules concerning the children of married people. The children of people who are gay and lesbian are no less deserving of these protections and benefits. In the vast majority fo cases, the sexual orientation of the children has nothing to do with the sexual orientation of the parents, so even if you believe their parents to be sinful, there's no reason to put their children in potential harm.
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