Ok this is totally a controversial post, but it’s a very important issue for our nation, so I’m going to take a stab at expressing my views about the problems with gay marriage.
In this issue we have two sides, deeply divided. On the one side, we have gays and their supporters, who want to be able to marry who they choose, as free, right-minded citizens. On the other side you have the ‘religious zealots’ who are prepared to fight to the death to protect what they call the sanctity of marriage, as defined in the bible.
At it’s core, the issue with gay marriage seems to stem from two things: the origins of word marriage itself, and a fundamental flaw which the US government made when it decreed marriage to be a legal process.
Marriage as a word has it’s roots in religion, and marriage itself has been around far longer than the US legal system has. So, I can’t really blame the religious when they say they don’t like the word being applied to gay couples. They have the right to believe in the Bible just as much as others have the right to ignore it, and the usage of the word in there gives them a right to defend it’s meaning as originally defined.
The real problem with this whole mess is the US government’s use of defining marriage as a legal contract. Somewhere along the line, we lost the ideal of the separation of church and state. By making marriage a legal process, we intermingled the legal benefits of the act (tax benefits, power of attorney, etc) with the religious aspect of the word marriage, which is the union between man and woman.
Joe Biden’s answer during the VP debate about granting legal rights to same-sex couples as if they were “married” (but not calling it marriage), in my eyes, is the bridge to the success of this argument, and I’m a little surprised it got picked on so much. Sure, it was a very ‘political’ answer to the question, but I think at it’s core he’s completely got the right idea. The fact that Sarah Palin agreed with his statements is testament to that.
So, my solution to this whole big mess would be for the US government to put more of a distinction in between the legal aspects of being in a committed relationship and the religious aspect of the term and religious ceremony of marriage. We’d do this for everyone, straight or gay. Everyone gets their legal partnership certificate (or whatever you’d call it), where the government recognizes the union between two conesnting adults (regardless of gender), and then the religious can be married by whomever they choose.
We need to realize that the word marriage is special and rooted in religion, and separate from any legal aspect of being a committed couple. If we can make that work, gays can gain all the legal benefits they desire, the religious can have the word marriage back, and for the most part, people should be content.
This blog belongs to Jade Rauenzahn, a 23 year-old web developer living in Hell's Kitchen, NYC.
Referring to same-sex unions as “civil unions” and affording them the same legal protections as marriage would solve the problem if it weren’t that the word “marriage” is written into thousands of existing laws. It would be very time-consuming to retrofit all the references in the legal code! I’d like to see “civil marriage” (legal relationship) and “holy marriage” (blessed by a church), but I sure agree that fighting over the terminology is stupid.
Everyone in a committed relationship ought to be entitled to the same basic protections — tax breaks, inheritance, custody of kids, medical decision making, etc. — regardless of the religious standing of their relationship. The churches can then decide who to unite in religious ceremonies and who to refuse.
My church is on the right side of this argument. In fact, my minister thinks we should sue the powers that be for interfering with our right to follow the precepts of our religion. We feel we should be permitted to marry same sex couples and we cannot because of legal constraints.