Tuesday, February 24, 2004
This will probably be my last post about the gay marriage issue. In no particular order (some thoughts cribbed from other places):
- As far as I can tell, there is considerably less opposition to giving gay couples similar rights to marriage as long as it's not actually called marriage. So the debate is about a single word.
- Bush wants to defend the "sanctity of marriage." The "sanctity of marriage" sounds awfully close to a religious definition, which the government shouldn't be involved in.
- The Constitution is a bad place to regulate social behavior. Really, the law is a bad place overall to regulate social behavior, especially the Constitution.
- Bush condemns "activist judges" who ignore the law, but I'm pretty sure that's how he became President in the first place.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes said: "The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins." I don't see where anyone's nose should be in someone else's relationship (with the obvious exceptions), so the right doesn't end. So to speak. I'm sure there's a clever way to state it, but I was left struggling for it (clearly).
- Ain't gonna happen. The hurdle to get an Amendment is just too high.
- Finally, this is just a big distraction, which is why I intend to avoid the subject in the future. Getting people up in arms about gay marriage means that people are not getting up in arms about Iraq, weapons of mass destruction (absence of), irresponsible tax cuts, Medicare pork, health care, defense pork, environmental degradation, and a whole host of other issues that actually matter where this administration is doing a bad, bad job. I'm not saying this doesn't matter per se, but that it's an election year tactic and won't get passed anyway. So let's not let ourselves get distracted from the real issues at hand. It's all too easy to exhaust your energy in an unwinnable (and unlosable) battle and have nothing left over for the battles that should be fought.