If your best response to me is that I am a bigot because you don’t understand that the law is not required to be bent into a pretzel to accommodate everyone’s preference for how the law is to applied to them speaks poorly of you. Disagreeing with what you call bigotry is not a mental defect. And of course I never made any statement of the sort you claimed in your last line.

But I hold no grudge with you. We all make mistakes in the heat of the moment.

Regards,
Bill

I think you dismiss too lightly why the Fourteenth Amendment offers no ground for gay-marriage as a constitutional right:

1. Restricting marriage to its traditional definition does not discriminate against homosexuals, who are in any case a very small percentage of the population (which is a legally valid consideration in redefining rights that are as fundamental and broadly applied as the marriage laws are in this country).

2. Certainly marriage has been defined as the union of one man to one woman. This is not arbitrary. There are compelling reasons for it. That union is the one that creates families, and the family is the prepolitical foundation of any state. Enlightened states will therefore formally recognize this reality and the benefit of strong families to the state’s well-being. So marriage laws protect and privilege the formation of such families to the exclusion of non-familial or quasi-familial associations.

3. Civil unions aren’t analogous to the oppressive “separate but equal’ doctrine that was the bulwark of state-enforced racial segregation. Many civil union laws are poorly cast to be sure. But in an advanced society like ours, there is a place for lawful associations of persons who choose to be interdependent regardless of any sexual component those associations may or may not have. Of course gay-marriage advocate argue that civil unions are not marriage. No, they’re not, but they do provide homosexual couples with almost all of what they need to support their freely chosen interdependency. What civil unions don’t do (ideally) is recognize the relevance of any sexual component between associates and they do not force private parties in many (generally reasonable) cases to provide marriage-like benefits to the associates of a civil union. The reason is simple: Gay marriage by definition is sterile. It cannot create a family. Children can only be produced by going OUTSIDE of the union, which draws in a host of unstable factors unlike the traditional marriage union.

4. None of this is to argue that heterosexuals don’t abuse or make a mess of traditional marriage. But this is a cultural abasement of marriage in which marriage is deemed as a free association of the married individuals that is considered successful only if it serves the narcissitic needs of each. (Of course, the law has abetted this vulgarization of marriage with no-fault divorce and now gay-marriage laws.) That idea that the formation, development, and defense of a strong family is the primary rationale of marriage has been lost upon many for a long time now. And so I suppose it’s not so odd that homosexuals want to get on-board with the conception of marriage amenable to their worldview that many (maybe most) heterosexuals have of it these days. But that conception is adolescent and narcissitic, and so just like no-fault divorce, gay marriage will have the same corrosive effect upon the morally and culturally serious rationales for the state privileging traditional marriage over other unions. Nonetheless, that privileged place in the law does not run afoul of the Fourthteenth Amendment because no one is denied access to it because of sexual orientation or behavior.

Regards, Bill

P.S. For those who think opposition of gay marriage is nothing but religious bigotry, note that none of what I have argued is predicated upon any religious doctrine.

The problem with your theory is that traditional marriage laws do not discriminate against homosexuals. Straight or gay, everyone has the right to marry another of the opposite sex. The fact that many homosexuals do not want to exercise this right does not logically support the conclusion that the government is discriminating against.

The Fourteenth Amendment is the nail in the coffin for false claim of discrimination. No homosexual can claim he is being denied the same right as a heterosexual to the institution of marriage. What gay-marriage advocates are demanding is a new right that no one ever had before: The right to marry a member of the same sex. There is much mendacity behind this demand under the rubric of discrimination.

Furthermore, the other claims of discrimination you allege fail to make a distinction between proclivity and behavior. It is the difference between hating the sinner and hating the sin, of which the former is uncommon these days while latter remains grounded in rationality and not mindless disgust.

Marriage is instituted by the church, not government.

The church’s definition of marriage = Man and Woman

To say a gay has a right to marriage is practically blasphemous

Gov. needs to create a civil union for Gays. I mean, are gays just trying to get “marriage” rights from the government just in spite of religious people denying it to them?

no no, they want to have the same benefits, treated equally, etc.

Then let there be a civil union for gays, not marriage.

Why do you think YOU CAN ONLY GET MARRIED BY A PRIEST ?
ITS A RELIGIOUS INSTITUTION AND GAY MARRIAGE CONFLICTS WITH GODS definition of MARRIAGE, therefore you are denied the “RIGHT”.

So-called “Christians” of the current era routinely lie about the Founders and their religion, or lack thereof. The first four presidents were Deists, not Christians. They didn’t believe that the Bible was divinely inspired, they didn’t believe that Christ as divine, they didn’t believe in the Trinity, and they didn’t believe in a God who actively intervened in daily life.

The Founders had many opportunities to declare this a “Christian nation,” or a “Judeo-Christian nation,” but they didn’t do so. Instead, the only mention of religion in the original Constitution was as something to be protected FROM.

So, the idea that a particular sect’s book of superstitions should be the governing force in the United States is not only ridiculous but is directly at odds with this country’s founding principles. “Christians” are well schooled at lying about all of this, but the repetition of lies doesn’t make them true.