Opinion

America unraveling

By Scott T. Hards

OK, so George W. was re-elected. I'll get over it. But what I may never get over is the huge growth of hate in America, which climaxed, for now, with the passage of 11 bans on same-sex marriage across the Union.

It would appear that these people, most of them Christians - people whose spiritual leader's most famous quote was "love thy neighbor" - have decided to ignore Christ's own teachings. It wasn't "love thy neighbor, unless he's gay." In fact, Christ doesn't say much about homosexuality in the Bible at all (except for Matthew 19:12, which can easily be interpreted as a call for tolerance and acceptance). Yet somehow these people are able to rationalize their contempt and intolerance as being "Christian values."

Funny thing is, these people also are proud to be Americans. America: Wasn't that "the land of the free"? Freedom is a glorious American tradition and one of the nation's founding principles. So why are Americans, by a 2-1 margin, voting to trample that tradition by denying a group of citizens their freedom?

Put in simple terms, freedom - the right to do whatever one wants - only has one condition: One may not do anything that will take that same right away from anyone else. But no opponent of same-sex marriage has yet explained convincingly how marriage between same-sex partners harms the personal freedom or rights of others.

If the institution of marriage needs any defending, it's not from loving couples who happen to have the same gender. It's from people like Britney Spears who wake up from a drunken stupor to discover that "oops, I signed some marriage papers" and then tear them up. It's from people who change their spouses like some of us change our shoes. It's from people who pretend to be faithful but are really sleeping all over the place.

Conservative Christians argue that marriage between a man and a woman has been a cultural norm in every society in the world throughout history. I agree. Therefore, they see nothing wrong with turning that tradition into a law. But there's nothing to say that what one can do should be limited to established cultural traditions.

Besides violating gay individuals' freedom rights, these laws also make a mockery of their right to pursue happiness, and are almost certainly unconstitutional as well, thanks to the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. Many rights groups are planning legal challenges to these statutes. Hopefully it will only be a matter of time before the nation's courts, generally far more enlightened than the nation's public, send these misguided, hateful travesties straight to the dustbin of history.

Shukan ST: Nov. 26, 2004

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