Not the Last We'll See of This

This makes me so angry.

"Marriage is something that is sacred," Smith said. "Some people view it as a union between man and woman. Some people view it as two people that are in love."

And some people are freaking liars.  Pointing at the ground while saying "sky" does not make the word "sky" mean ground.

"You are telling a whole group of people that their love is not valid and that their feelings for each other are not real," Edgell said.  "The point of marriage is love."

You are trying to change the subject because you know you are wrong.  No one is claiming "their feelings are not real."  The "point" of marriage is debatable, but the definition is not.

"(Being gay) is not something you choose to do," Kirwan said.  "It is who you are."

Who you are is a liar.  You aren’t "gay," you are a homo.  "Gay" was a perfectly good word with a definition, until homosexuals decided to change the definition, and everyone else looked the other way.

This Marriage Amendment was a bizarre thing.  I think the basic problem here is that there are two separate issues that most people are merging together (possibly without realizing it).  The first is the simple fact that marriage isn’t some idea invented by the government, it’s a word with a definition, which every dictionary (before the last few years) lists as "union of a man and a woman."  The second issue is that the government grants special privileges to married couples.

I think that most people, when presented with those two distinct issues, would say that 1) we don’t have the right nor the ability to just change the definition of a word, and 2) the government should not give special privileges to heterosexuals but deny those to homosexuals.  I think it would be unreasonable to disagree with those very basic statements.

But when you present those two issues together as "gay marriage," all hell breaks loose.  Reasonable people, who believe that the word "marriage" has a definition, will oppose "gay marriage" because it’s a contradiction.  Other reasonable people, who believe that the government should not favor one group over another, will support "gay marriage" because it’d be discriminatory not to.  Both of these otherwise reasonable groups of people are failing to recognize that there are two distinct issues here, and that most of them actually agree with each other.

The amendment might have been a good idea, and might have had a chance of passing, if it had properly identified these two separate issues.  It properly stated that marriage has a definition that ought to be respected, but it botched the second half.  The amendment said that states could not be forced to give homosexual unions the same privileges granted to marriages, but it should have also said that states could not be forced to withhold those privileges from homosexual unions.  By failing to make that assertion, the amendment would have allowed states to grant privileges to heterosexual unions (marriages) and deny them to homosexual unions -- indeed, that was the purpose of the amendment.  But many people find that to be unreasonable, and won’t allow it to pass in that form.

It’s wrong (and stupid) for pro-homo judges to try to redefine the term "marriage," but it’s also wrong (and stupid) (and dangerous) for the federal government to dictate what should rightly be state policy.  A federal-level mandate (i.e. amendment) saying "marriage is marriage" makes sense in light of the current stupidity of some judges/groups in this country, but a federal-level mandate that privileges one group over another does not make sense.