Gay Marriage - The compromise

Wedge Issues

I had an interesting discussion with a few of my boys over lunch the other day regarding everyone’s favorite wedge issue…Gay marriage.

Keep in mind these two friends are staunch republicans and Christians, needless to say the phrase, “I’m really not opposed, nor do I care, too much about a lot of the issues, but what gets me is their [Romney and Obama] stance on gay marriage.”

For a little background information both my friends are between 26-30 years of age, one Hispanic and one Caucasian, one has 2 children, the other has non and both are married.  Both are college educated professionals and both have voted republican since age 18.

The discussion took what I’ve learned to be the normal course for this topic, that’s to say we hit the following topics:

1. The sanctity of marriage

2. The country was founded on Christian principles which do not support gay marriage.

3. God wanted it to be man and woman (Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve).

4. I just don’t understand it.

5. Are you gay?

I normally counter these arguments by outlining the distinction between laws and religion. For me this has always been at the heart of the matter and really what I wanted to talk about and ultimate what I was able to show at least two people over the course of about an hour.

First let me say it’s scary as all hell to think that there are people who almost BLINDLY vote a particular way based on issues that have NOTHING to do with law, but rather religious opinion, I’d also point out that I’m a Christian, and while I personally don’t believe in gay marriage, I also understand that it’s really not my place to try to enforce laws on grown adults when they harm no one, but also deny them rights afforded to other citizens.

 Let’s get on with outlining the distinction between religion and law and how things apply when one discusses “gay marriage”.

The concept of marriage is a funny one. On one hand we have the religious institution, I say religious because almost ALL religious have some form of marriage. On the other hand we have the “legal” term of marriage, which is when two people state that they’d like the law to recognize the “couple” as one. There are a myriad of LEGAL (re: LAW) “benefits” people get for being married; taxes, social security benefits for their spouse, housing classifications (family only), estate planning benefits, FMLA, death benefits, medical benefits, etc, etc, etc…the list goes on and on. (http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/marriage-rights-benefits-30190.html - here is a good site that quickly points out some of the benefits). The list of benefits received from RELIGIOUS marriage really depend on the religion, some include fulfillment of a commandment, a “oneness” with your spouse…aside from that I really can’t think of any to be honest with you, outside of the “rules” that apply to marriage the benefits really don’t amount to much, after all priests don’t get married so we can’t really say it’s “required” by god. To be more accurate we could say IF you decided to marry, God asks that you do XYZ.

The issue with applying the “RELIGIOUS” version of marriage to everyone is pretty self-evident…for those of you who missed the boat NOT EVERYONE IS RELIGIOUS. As Americans we’ve established that people can practice whatever religion they want, even NO religion, I think most people would agree this is a GREAT IDEA. In fact the few places that FORCE religion on their people are places we typically blow up from time to time. If we cannot really apply “religion” to everyone fairly and equally then we really have only one way to look at marriage FOR EVERYONE and that’s through a legal lens.

In order to look at marriage in a purely legal sense we have to remove ALL religious connotations from the discussion, so for that I’m going to replace “Marriage” (as seen in the eyes of the law) with the term “legal union”.  In America we believe in freedoms applied equally to everyone (even if we don’t always practice this,  I’m working the angle that we WANT this to happen and we want to practice it). Give that we WANT freedom and the laws applied equally to everyone when you start talking about legal unions and NOT allowing certain people equal rights you start to run headlong into the problem with NOT allowing homosexuals access to “legal unions.” The truth of the matter is that if you want to prevent someone from having access to legal unions you are denying them a basic rights that everyone else has access to and you’re doing it based on a religious belief. The problem with this is that your religious belief, like it or not, are NOT to be applied to laws. (consider also that not all religions share the same beliefs so who’s beliefs do we apply to the law? (Muslim, Christian, Sikhs, Buddhists???)

Shoving religion into a legal institution such as a legal union would be the same thing as saying muslims can’t get driver’s licenses because they are muslims. Or Mormons can’t get married because they don’t believe what you believe. When you start to pump religion into civil rights you start limiting who has access to those rights and that is the exact opposite of what America stands for.

THE COMPROMISE

Back to the conversation with my two friends.

What I was able to eventually arrive at was that the marriage of two men offended their religious sensibilities, more to the point they thought that the TERM Marriage should not lose it’s Man and a woman status but they had no problem with the term “legal union/civil union” which would allow gays to marry through the government (they agreed that to apply the laws fairy you had to grant the same legal protections to everyone). They held steadfast to their guns saying marriage was between a man and a woman, but agreed that a legal union was only fair for everyone.

The point I’m making with what I was able to get at with my friends is simple. I believe the argument of marriage is a semantic one. It’s a word game. What I think would work best for everyone involved is if we completely removed the legal term MARRIAGE from the law books and replaced it with the more accurate term (legal union). Marriage would still have its place, that place would be in the walls of churches, synagogues, mosques and temples. Ironically enough my two friends agreed…they’ll still vote Romney, though they don’t know why now… *shrug*

Here’s my questions to you.

1. Do you belive marriage to be between a man and woman only.

2. Do you find “THE COMPROMISE” suiting to your wishes

3. Why or why not?