Gay Marriage

Gay Marriage

Most people's response to the question, "Should gays and lesbians be allowed to marry in the same way that straight couples do?" is usually automatic. Most that believe that God created the universe some six-thousand years ago, and laid down His absolute moral law in the pages of the Holy Bible, you regard marriage by definition as a sacred union between a man and a woman for the purpose of procreation. If, on the other hand, you believe the universe is billions of years old, that human beings have an extremely intimate genetic relationship with chimpanzees, and that moral laws are constructed socially rather than supernaturally, you may think different about the issue. The battle continues, and the future is uncertain. Should gay couples have the right to be legally married? Through the first part of this paper, I am going to explore what people think is "good" and what is "fair" about same-sex marriage.

The variety of different sexual norms and beliefs through the centuries is amazing. The founders of Western civilization, the ancient Greeks, who gave us Plato and Aristotle, who were every bit as sophisticated and self-aware as we are, sometimes practiced man-boy homosexuality. In medieval France, it's said that a bride-to-be on her way to the church traditionally had sex with every man she met on the way. The Mormons, like Jacob and King Solomon, had a thing for polygamy. The age of consent in the nineteenth century was usually around ten years old. And interracial marriage remained illegal in thirteen U.S. states until 1967. Even by 1990, only ten states had passed laws saying a man can't rape his own wife.

Same-sex marriage is not now legal in any jurisdiction in the United States, nor in any country in the world for that matter. But it's closer to becoming a reality than ever before. Various cities and states have enacted "domestic partner" laws, which, while not conferring the official status of marriage on a same-sex couple, provide them with a few of the same benefits.

There has never been any fixed, traditional definition of marriage. The idea of marriage is constantly changing according to the changing needs of society. The world we live in today is very different from the world of a hundred or fifty years ago and our institutions must be altered to reflect these changes.

Just as the Supreme Court struck down laws preventing interracial marriage in 1967 (Loving v. Virginia), the laws currently preventing gay couples from enjoying the legal status of marriage must also be struck down. This is not merely an argument of changes over the term "marriage," but a civil rights issue.

There is such in a thing in the United States as the separation of Church and State. America is not based on one particular faith, nor on a single moral code, but on a multitude of faiths. Your feelings as a member of a particular religious community, you have a responsibility as a citizen to support the extension of the same civil rights you yourself enjoy to everyone equally. Race, sex, religion, and sexual orientation must not affect the even application of civil rights.

Civil recognition of a union between two people is separate from religious recognition. Marriage licenses can be issued without a religious ceremony and those who are opposed to same-sex marriage would be no more forced to accept it morally than they are forced to accept homosexuality itself.

The latest scientific evidence strongly suggests that homosexuality is predetermined by one's genetic makeup. Those who oppose same-sex marriage cannot do so on the basis that being gay or straight is an option. It is simply discrimination to deny a loving couple the opportunity to get married, regardless of the sexual orientation of the partners. In the book "Aids and You," Michael Schwartz argues that "homosexuals are born and not made. An individual's sexual orientation is innate, God-given, and absolutely beyond his or anyone else's control."

There is no evidence to suggest that social problems are caused by gay lifestyles any more than they are caused by so-called "traditional" lifestyles. Same-sex couples are as likely as straight couples to live healthy, happy, well-adjusted lives, and to provide a good environment in which to raise children. Though they cannot procreate themselves, gays and lesbians could adopt and raise children just as well as straight couples.

The practice of homosexuality is a violation of the religious faith American society is based on. We have a responsibility to be sympathetic to our fellow human beings, but extending to homosexual couples the special privileges of the traditional family would undermine the sanctity of the family.

Building in part on this Greco-Roman tradition, the early Christian Church treated marriage as a monogamous heterosexual union created and ordered by God. Already in paradise, God had brought the first man and the first woman together and had commanded them to "be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth" God had created them as social creatures, naturally inclined and attracted to each other, and physically capable of joining together sexually as "one flesh" for the sake of procreation.

While such views came to intermittent in later Roman and Germanic law in the first millennium C.E., they came to full elaboration in the course of the Papal Revolution of ca. 1075-1300. In this era, the church developed a systematic idea of marriage that still is taught today. "Men and women are naturally inclined to come together for the sake of having children, and the natural law teaches that it should be done through marriage."

Traditional marriage improves the health of its participants, has the lowest rate of domestic violence, prolongs life, and is the best context in which to raise children. "The suggestion that homosexuals can be 'married' is absurd, since marriage is, by definition, a union between a man and a woman."

No homosexual couple can claim a right to marriage, if marriage is, by definition, the joining of two people of opposite sex. Furthermore, the reason

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