Two victories have recently occurred in the battle to legalize gay marriage: Iowa allowed the legal recognition of gay marriages, and Lawrence opened up its Domestic Partnership Registry.
These victories are mere representations of how far there still is to go.
The DPR, which was implemented Aug. 13, costs $25 more than a marriage license and it doesn’t come with any benefits.
It exists solely as a formal avenue of acknowledgement, chiefly for companies that provide benefits for gay couples. The window for legal marriage in Iowa, put into place Aug. 27, didn’t even last 24 hours.
But still, I am extremely happy and excited to see a glimmer of success, though it’s positioned far off in the distance.
Two steps forward, one step back. Twenty-seven state constitutions, including Kansas, contain amendments banning same-sex marriages, and there’s still talk about introducing an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that restricts marriage as a right between a man and a woman and disallowing states individual interpretations.
But like Sisyphus, I am ready to join the collective movement of putting the shoulder to the boulder to prod back up the hill of progress.
Like always, it’s a battle between change and tradition. Marriage is laced with a plethora of interpretations, but largely, it is viewed as a traditional social practice shared between a man and a woman, usually in order to produce a family.
One common argument against legalizing gay marriage is that it will damage the meaning of marriage itself.
When the only qualification for marriage is different sexual gear, the most dysfunctional, degenerate individuals are allowed to participate, but gays cannot.
This is because some think marriage means boy plus girl equals babies.
You know the playground rhyme: first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes the baby in the baby carriage. Some think that legally recognizing gay marriages would soil the true pursuit of the institution: procreation.
This argument has no value because there are plenty of childless heterosexual couples, whether by choice or infertility, that have the privilege of being legally recognized. And there are also plenty of unacknowledged gay couples raising children.
The justification and reasoning for marriage cannot rest on procreation alone.
The most common objection to gay marriage isn’t pro-marriage. It’s anti-gay. The largest army fighting against legalizing gay marriage is the Christian Coalition of America. God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.
The religious right obtains most of its armory against the gay movement from Leviticus, the same book that forbids men from clipping their beards, people from getting tattoos and women from having sex while on their periods.
The book also promotes sacrificing animals, and exiling or burning and stoning lawbreakers to death.
In order to be consistent, if we allow religion to trickle and drip into the legal realm when it comes to gay marriage, we should judge all other legal elements by the same standard.
But to do so would poison the very foundation of which this country was built upon.
I do not denounce the significance of the Bible, but we have a separation of church and state, which should make religion an insufficient and irrelevant argument.
What if the most common religious text prohibited interracial or interdenominational marriage? What then, would people have to submit to a religious conversion, or in some cases, associate themselves with a religion in the first place, to get married?
One can easily see, I hope, why religion should not serve as a measuring stick when assembling the boundaries and regulations of the law. Even if a person has strong feelings against the practice of homosexual activity, he or she should not categorize homosexuals as second-class citizens.
To suggest that heterosexuals are the only ones that should have access to social practices would be to suffer from intellectual myopia. Rationally speaking, it makes much more sense to distribute the same set of rights to all individuals.
This, after all, is not an argument over whether gays have the capacity to form meaningful, lasting relationships with other people. They already do that. Gay relationships already exist, but just aren’t legally recognized.
Marriage is an agreement two individuals make to spend their lives together. It’s usually characterized by companionship and mutual love.
Given that gay people have the capacity to forge meaningful relationships, they should be eligible to participate in the social practice of marriage, and receive all of its benefits and burdens.