Yesterday, there was a rally in support of a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriages at the Minnesota state Capitol. According to Michele Bachmann, the state senator who is sponsoring the bill to put it to the vote, with recent polls showing up to 70% of the state's population in support of the bill, there is "no more uniting issue." Furthermore, she predicts that if the amendment were put on the ballot, it would be supported by 75% of voters.
I am stricken. Truly, I cannot believe Minnesota has come to this. Is this to be the legacy of our generation, that the one thing we could all agree on is to stop one group of people from uniting their lives together in love, and enshrine that prohibition in the state constitution?
Can someone please explain to me why same-sex marriage is a threat to conventional, man-woman marriage? Are two women who get married some how preventing an opposite sex couple from doing the same? Where is the threat? If you don't want to marry someone of the same sex, then by all means don't, but how does it affect you if some other couple wants to do it?
Consider this quote from an an interview with Bachmann by the author of a blog called Residual Forces:
[Bachmann] pointed out that it was just 2 years ago that Canada’s courts struck down its own DOMA type law. Canada had a law protecting traditional marriage, but the courts said that same sex marriages must be allowed. So, the law put in place by the parliament of Canada was overruled by a court.Here are some very interesting facts about Canada that the Senator pointed out. Did you know that only about 1 to 2% of Canadians are gay? And only 2% of that 2% actually want to get married or have gotten married, a minority of a minority as she put it. That means that only 0.04% of the people in Canada can benefit from the law the courts made allowing same sex marriages. The other 99.96% are out of luck. Their entire country was changed for such a few people.
I don't get it. If only .04% of the population of Canada would likely take advantage of the opportunity to marry someone of the same sex, how is that changing the "entire country"? As the author points out, 99.96% of the population is completely unaffected. Even if these same sex couples really were an evil influence of some kind, wouldn't the "danger" presented by .04% of the population be pretty neglible?
Traditional marriage may indeed be in need of protection. The sanctity of marriage has long been under attack . . . but not from same sex couples. Personally, I can think of several celebrities whose serial marriages have done much more damage to the public perception of marriage as an institution. We live in a society that, for better or for worse (no pun intended) sees relationships much more fluidly than past generations. No one blinks an eye at cohabitation and quickie divorces.
Some of the other threats to marriage and "family values" that I see: the effects of poverty, racism, drug addiction, violence, and misplaced priorities. Couldn't we do much more to support marriage as an institution by addressing these much more pervasive and powerful ills?
But no, that would be too much work.
Posted by ldfs at April 21, 2005 3:59 PM | TrackBack