love & marriage

Wake up! I CANNOT BELIEVE the sheer idiocy out there. Well, let’s call it what it is: smart people are scrambling to justify their outdated morality.

They’re saying that if we allow same-sex marriages we’ll end up allowing incestuous marriages. I want to club these people with baby seals. How the hell do they manage to follow that path of mangled logic without breaking an ankle?

Well, give them as much rope as you can: what does marriage symbolize? The morality of the state or a public declaration of devotion by two people in love? How, for example, do you feel about a man who divorces one woman to marry her sister? It’s not classy, but should it be legal? Do you even know if it is? For that matter, why does marriage have to be two people?

The short answer is that it’s public convention rooted in religion and tradition. Monogamy and all that. But aside from the fact that inbreeding stresses faulty genes it’s only a convention that incest is wrong. Just convention.

To jump ahead a bit, if marriage is a religious institution then it must follow the dictates of the religion under which it is conducted. If you want to be married by the Church then you have to do it by their rules. It’s an ancient and venerable institution and blah blah blah. Resistant to change like nothing else in the universe.

But if you are seeking to have your union legally recognized by the state, which is purportedly by the people and for the people, and arguably an up-to-date institution, then shouldn’t policy be in keeping with the times? How can we accept homesexuality socially without recognizing it legally?

I’ll say that again:

How can we accept homesexuality socially without recognizing it legally?

I’m not talking about the social acceptance of marijuana, because the chief argument there is that we already accept booze, which is arguably worse for you, so why not pot as well? It’s faulty logic, and the questioin here isn’t about the validity of marriage as an institution, but the definition of marriage.

I’m talking about the social equivalent of giving women the vote. Women have brains and can display sound independent judgement and therefore deserve the vote. Same-sex couples are just as in love, demonstrate just as much loyalty, and last every bit as long as traditional married couples.

In fact, the only conceivable (pun intended) reason we can claim for denying them marriage is that they can’t have kids without outside help, either from a sperm donor or a surrogate mother. That says that marriage is all about procreation. But, currently you can legally:

1) have kids without being married.
2) be married for most of your life and never have kids.
3) adopt as a single parent
4) adopt as a single parent and live with another person of the same sex and raise that child in a family environment.

There goes that argument.

It’s old news that being gay isn’t learned. Exposure to homosexuality may, however, make you more accepting, in the exact same way that exposure to drinking beer or smoking pot or driving fast or working hard or volunteering at old folks’ homes may make you more accepting of any of these behaviours. I just want to illuminate the fact that it’s the outmoded morality of a portion of the population that is holding us back. Literally the conservatives, who are endlessly whining about the decay of society and still refuse to actually do anything about it. If fully half of society is not yet ready to embrace the times, does that mean the other half should wait? Keep on having parades? That’s what I’m saying: HALF of society says same-sex marriage is just fine by them. And no one is asking YOU to marry anyone you don’t want to, same-sex, or the wrong colour. It’s a personal choice, an idea you are clearly uncomfortable with, so shut up.

The bottom line comes back to social acceptance vs legal recognition. And where there is one, there should be both, at least as long as we’re talking about something as benign as love between two consenting (and unrelated) adults.