In Defense of Gay Marriage

While I'm on the subject, I think I'll explain why I support same-sex marriages.

It isn't hurting anyone. It doesn't really concern anyone except the two individuals involved. It's an expression of love, of two people's commitment to each other. Yet somehow, some people are actually offended at the idea that two people of the same gender could make a vow of love.

Those opposed to the idea of gay marriage seem to think that it will ruin heterosexual marriage, and by extension, the family unit, and somehow destroy society. Though how things could progress from marrying two men to the death of modern society is never explained...

Let's start with the idea same-sex marriage would ruin traditional heterosexual marriage... does marrying two men (or two women) suddenly reach in and affect the lives of everyone already married? Not really. No one's asking to change heterosexual marriage, just to extend that concept to same-sex couples. A gay marriage has an impact on the lives of the two gays getting married, but nobody else.

Does gay marriage wreck the family unit? Perhaps... but only if you allow gay couples to raise children. Now, at this point, some proponents of gay marriage would back down a bit, and say that well... they're just asking for the right to marry, not to adopt children and have a "gay family" with same-sex parents. But there will be no backpedaling. Not here. Not today.

Let's take a cold, hard look at traditional families, shall we? The starting point of the argument a same-sex couple couldn't raise children is that only heterosexual couples can provide the proper environment for children. But can we really take it for granted that the best possible environment for children is with their biological parents?

By now, most people have heard of the Austrian who locked his daughter in his basement for years, secretly fathering more children through her, keeping them all locked away in his "dungeon".
http://www.nationalpost.com/most_popular/story.html?id=477656
That's just a fluke, right? Besides, this is Austria we're talking about, not America. Ok then, how about the guy in New York who did much the same, but threw the babies into a hole?
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2007/04/25/national/a212059D93.DTL
Oh, but he was an immigrant... real Americans would never, ever do such a thing! Then how about this Tennessee guy who used electric dog collars to "enslave" his daughters while he raped them?
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,311646,00.html
There's plenty more examples where those came from! ...and those are just the parents who sexually abuse their children. I didn't even get to the ones that beat and kill their kids!

If we're going to worry so much about who is and isn't allowed to raise children, I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest your average gay couple would be better than such abusive traditional families. I think it matters less whether a man and a woman, or two men, or two women want to adopt a child, than whether or not they have genuine caring for that child. I would go as far to say that any two individuals could be suitable to raising a child solely on the basis of love, affection, and a stable, non-abusive psychology. (Yes, I am aware of single-parent families, but I'd rather stick to the topic at hand.)

So, if we can't argue a gay marriage would ruin heterosexual marriage, or that would be a bad cornerstone for a family compared to heterosexual marriage, what's left? You guessed it: that gay marriage is wrong on the basis of religious morality.

Coincidentally, I recently read in passing about a Baptist minister in Texas who ran afoul of a sting against soliciting underage sex online...
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-05-18-texas-minister-resigns_N.htm
This isn't just some isolated incident... this sort of thing happens all the time... even the Associate Baptist Press admits it!
http://www.abpnews.com/1780.article
And if you thought it was just Baptists, there's a Chicago Presbyterian reverend who was caught soliciting prostitutes...
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-pastor-arrest_12may12,0,7275891.story
...not to mention the endless rain of fallout from the widespread child molestation of the Catholic Church.

The hypocrisy is so thick you can cut it with a knife. If these are the religious voices telling us what is and isn't "moral", then they have no right to say a single word against gays and gay marriage! (Or for that matter, pretty much all of human sexuality.) At least not until they can practice what they preach.

Those of us of the religious persuasion who don't happen to be immoral hypocrites, and say the Bible is against being gay, are quite frankly bigots (who just happen to be bigoted against gays) looking for an excuse in obscure passages of their holy book of choice. If they didn't have Bibles, they'd find some other ancient words to support their views. Maybe a quote from some forgotten Roman philosopher, or the 612th page of a Victorian novel, or maybe block out every other letter on a candy bar wrapper to make a sentence. Point is, fundamentally, they're just not capable of coming up with their own reasoning against it (at least no reasoning beyond claiming to speak for an omnipotent being, though that's a whole other story) so they desperately cling to anything they can find as "justification".

So there you have it. The arguments against gay marriage just keep falling apart. And without the support of a "reason" for their beliefs, the people against it are nothing more than a bunch of nosy folks who seem a little too interested in homosexuals' love lives... Let's stop mucking around in the romantic lives of gays, let them declare their love through marriage, and move on already!