But if a state legislature decides to protect gays from discrimination, it seems obvious to me that gay marriage is legal in that state.
Traditionally, marriage has been defined as a contract between a man and a woman. There were certain requirements to enter into the contract - you had to be a certain age, not have certain diseases, not be related too closely, not be married already. Homosexuals were not prohibited from marrying, they just had to find a person of the opposite sex like everybody else. Besides, nobody had a civil right to marry; the states were allowed to set their own conditions, subject to constitutional provisions.
Now the proponents of same-sex marriage are redefining the act to be between any two consenting people (I keep asking, as long as we are redefining marriage, what is going to stop polygamy?), and therefore demanding equal rights for same-sex marriages. Slipping in the redefinition of marriage under cover of Chapter II protection certainly seems to be pulling a fast one to me, and will likely earn a backlash in the form of some legal definition of marriage as one man + one woman.
Stupid. Civil unions would have given people a chance to get used to the idea, and think about issues that need to be worked out, such as how to define common-law same-sex unions, and do civil unions require a sexual relationship to be valid (marriages do), or can they be done for platonic relationships as well? |
