DISCRIMINATION AND THE GAY MARRIAGE BAN

America has a rich legacy of discriminating against one group or another based upon tenuous reasoning, so it's no surprise that states would attempt to ban certain people from marrying, including homosexuals. From the 1500's through the 1960's, discrimination against Blacks was legally sanctioned, largely upon the belief that Black people were racially inferior to whites. The U.S. Constitution provided men with the right to vote the day it was ratified. Women waited 133 years to acquire the same privilege, largely because of the prevailing belief that women lacked sufficient intellect to make a proper choice. In WWII, Japanese-American citizens were segregated and confined to detention camps to appease the public's fear of American-Japanese insurrection. It didn't matter that insurrection never occurred in the first place. People thought it might, and that was enough to legitimize the discrimination.

The same arguments favoring bans on homosexual marriage were advanced as recently as forty years ago to support bans on interracial marriage. It didn't matter that the arguments of old lacked reason; discrimination is born of ignorance. Inter-racial marriage was argued to be unnatural, a threat to the future of traditional marriage, biblically outlawed and a harbinger of no future for children born of such a union. Try pitching that last argument to Barack Obama.

Is homosexuality unnatural? One should start by asking what's 'unnatural'. The dictionary on my bookshelf defines the term as "violating natural law", so let's go with that definition. Does homosexuality violate nature's laws? Apparently not! A plethora of recent scientific studies have concluded that same-sex sexual behavior is found in nearly every animal species. If the studies that suggest homosexuality in humans span from 5% to 20% of the population are true, humans are merely mimicking the statistical occurrence of homosexuality throughout the animal kingdom. Far from violating nature's law, human homosexual patterns appear to be following it.

Does homosexual marriage threaten the future of the traditional marriage? It's hard to see how. States that have allowed homosexual unions and/or marriages haven't witnessed any increase in the divorce rate among heterosexual couples, so there's no basis for arguing that heterosexual spouses will suddenly start abandoning those marriages in favor of homosexual ones. The divorce rate in America has hovered around 50% long before homosexual marriage or civil unions became an option, largely thanks to couples not communicating and infidelity, so the notion of homosexual marriage posing a greater threat to traditional marriage than those factors is downright laughable.

And what of the future of children reared by homosexual parents versus heterosexual parents? Again, the consensus in the scientific community is that no appreciable differences exist.

What's left is the Biblical argument, and when push comes to shove, that's the main reason folks oppose homosexual marriage. Arguing the Bible in this context is a losing proposition in my book, because you can find a quote in the Bible to support any proposition you advance, from the abomination of eating a good old-fashioned Maryland crab cake (Leviticus 11: 9-12) to the evils of polyester (Leviticus 19: 19). One thing I do know is that the drafters of the Constitution espoused the belief that religion and government shouldn't mix, and toward that end, religion shouldn't provide government with a justification to discriminate. That's bad government. Come to think of it, that's bad religion too.