Marriage Issue

I guess this is as a good a time as any to talk about the marriage issue facing the country today. Let me begin by saying that I do not understand the legal rationale for why the government recognizes marriage. To me it seems like an arbitrary set of rules that has long been desired and accepted by the people of this country. I feel that marriage is a religious institution and the government's recognition of it is strange. My dad, a pretty party-line Republican, says that the government recognizes marriage because its the fundamental unit of government, and he believes this is an adequate explanation. I disagree, cynically believing that there are as many destructive marriages as constructive, if not more. However, that may still have been the motivation of those who made the laws. Fine, that works. Others more pragmatically have suggested that supporting child raising is the motivation for the government's recognition of marriage. To this I say that not all married couples are raising children, and some that aren't married are. So it seems that child-raising status ought to be the measure then, not marriage.

One way or the other, I'm not seeing much hard data on why heterosexual marriages deserve recognition by the government and homosexual marriages do not. It seems to me that if those opposed to homosexual marriage are correct and it violates the reason to recognize marriage or its bad for society that it should be a simple matter to prove their point. This is what I require to be convinced: a plain, rational reason why heterosexual marriages deserve recognition by the government and clear evidence that homosexual marriages do not. Saying that heterosexual marriages deserve recognition because they're "right" or because "that's the way its meant to be" are not good reasons. If someone was trying to get me to live with a law that prevented me from getting treatment I felt I deserved those reasons would only incite anger and resentment in me. I believe that our homosexual citizens, as full and equal citizens under the law as well as fellow human beings, deserve better.

All that being said, I will be voting in favor of an amendment in Colorado that defines marriage as between one man and one woman. Sound hypocritical? Here is why: I don't believe that the ends justify the means. I am not convinced that I should support government recognition of marriage at all. However, I do not believe that it should ever be right for a judge to change the law by reinterpreting what it means over a technicality when its obvious what the law originally meant. I firmly believe that the marriage laws that are now on the books were made with the idea that marriage would solely belong to one man and one woman. So my vote says this: "The laws we have on the books now are for marriage between a man and a woman. They may not be right, but we need to know exactly where we stand and those are the laws currently. Now that we've established that, we have the freedom and space to have a real conversation about whether these laws are the way they should be or whether they should be further amended, perhaps out of existence."

Opponents of this amendment are trying to take a short-cut to government approved homosexual marriage by exploiting a lack of clarity in the laws. If they are successful then homosexual marriage may become a part of American government without the people ever getting a chance to debate and and discuss why it should or shouldn't be. It will sidestep all the channels that new laws are supposed to go through, and I feel this will be detrimental to society, perhaps homosexuals especially, in the long run. I believe that whenever we clearly know the intent behind a law, that is what should be upheld, not the letter of the law, so to speak. If a law is wrong in intent then the law should be changed through the correct legal process, which is through the legislature. Not by reinterpreting its meaning to something acceptable through the judiciary.