Sunday, September 27, 2015

The Argument for Gay Marriage

After the legalization of gay marriage, there have been a lot of disputes on whether or not the Supreme Court overstepped their bounds by "creating legislation". Republican candidates such as Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz have vehemently opposed this decision, citing that marriage has always been between a man and a woman just as the Bible states. Unfortunately for those 18th century bigots, the Bible is not the Constitution. Also, the Bible doesn't say between a man and a woman; it says between a man and WOMEN. Definitely, there is no polygamy happening in the states unless its one of those random sister wives episodes that pops up every so often in West Virginia. Of course, there is also the fact that all of the SCOTUS justices are deeply religious and usually old, Catholic, white guys i.e. the same people who voted Cruz and Huckabee into office to begin with. And if those Republican Methuselahs can say it should be legal then that should be all the proof in the world that Cruz and Huckabee are out of line.

Also unfortunately for them, there was no random creation of legislation as they said. The legislation that the Supreme Court contested was that of the states' ability to deny marriage based on gender pairings. And being perfectly economical about the situation (cruel I know), marriage is primarily a financial institution. Therefore to place a restriction on a financial institution based on gender pairings is actually ludicrous from a legal standpoint. Essentially, marriage makes you business partners, and as  a capitalist country with relatively low regulations on business procedure it seems a bit hypocritical to deny the entity that is a gay couple the right to fair business practices.

To be emotionally invested in the argument would condense the huge issue of not being married into one situation. Your partner of twenty plus years is sick with cancer and has to be placed on life support. You aren't married nor is it possible for you to be married. They have told you that they want to remain on life support for a month, but the family disagrees. They need money fast and decide to take your lover off life support. You have no say and you can't even see them at the hospital. Next they have free rein over all of you and your partner's belongings, everything you've accumulated together over the years, and since you are not married the courts will not view it as shared property. You essentially loose everything in one fell swoop. Your life ruined. All because the government won't allow you to get married.

All this because some people say that the gay problem isn't like the Civil Rights movement. "They only make up 2% of the population," they say, Well if you were an African American in the fifties, but could be mistaken as white, wouldn't you state that you were white just to protect yourself? How many haven't listed themselves as gay in order to protect themselves? We should leave it up to the states to decide they argue. The US was already behind the times when it came to gay marriage by more than five years, waiting for the states to decide would have taken at least a decade. The same could have been said about black rights in the fifties. We could have still been segregated in the eighties if SCOTUS hadn't passed segregation. The Supreme Court has done us a favor by putting us with the times just as they did in the sixties.


Update: To combat the religious opposition, I will only say that if God were against gay people why do they exist? He had to have wanted them since homosexuality is present in most species and has been in ours for almost as far back as we've recorded.

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