I’m sure by now all of you have seen the news that New York has become the 7th state to legalize same sex marriage. During the debate in the Republican controlled state senate it was dead locked. They actually extended their special summer session to work it out. In the final vote, the vote that won equal rights for same sex marriage, was from a Republican.
I’ve seen the speech he gave before casting his vote, but I’m too tired to dig it up and post it. He starts off with saying that he was raised Roman Catholic and believes marriage to be between a man and a woman. However, he could find no legal secular reason to oppose giving same sex couples the same rights that he and his wife have. He then voted in the affirmative changing the laws of New York in favor of equality.
That is secular democracy at work. It doesn’t matter what you believe to be right or moral. Whether or not there is a legal secular reason for a position is the only thing that matters. He got it right. Pure and simple, if the only argument you have against something is that it’s against church teachings, against the Bible, or against what you think God would want, then it has no business in our government.
The Republican presidential candidates are all coming out strong as being “pro family.” This is code for anti-choice and anti-gay. They are going with the argument that marriage is the pro-creative union of a man and a woman to join together to start a family.
By that logic post-menopausal women, women who have had their tubes tied, men who have had vasectomies, and everyone else who is infertile for one reason or another shouldn’t be married. There is no fertility test required to get a marriage licence and marriages aren’t annulled if no child has been produced after a certain period of time. And what about same sex couples who want to have a family either by adoption, in vitro fertilization, or surrogacy?
The side in favor of marriage equality is the side that is winning, and will continue to win. The is no secular reason to prevent a couple from being able to marry and the lame attempts to create one fail very quickly. Heck, a Republican state legislature has just codified same sex marriage!
The tide is turning. It would be nice if everybody, even Christians were to get on the winning side. The alternative would be about on par with being on the wrong side of civil rights and even slavery. Nobody wants to lose in the culture war, but if you don’t even have a good fight to start with you don’t stand a chance of winning.
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I think it'd be interesting to see what would happen if gays called themselves 'Pro-Family', since really marriage equality would allow for their families to have full equality. I notice a repeated failure of liberal rights movements to underline 'it's our right' rather than 'we want equality'. Within conservative culture, you'll notice 'equality' is sneered at as the poor ethnic minorities and gays trying to invade suburbia. Meanwhile 'rights' to them has a ring of unquestionable "The god of white heterosexual males who wrote the constitution says so". Taking the language from oppressors, in my opinion, is an important step in any culture war.