Bush's amendment violates historical precedents

The Lipstick Liberal

By Virginia Cabrera

On Feb. 24, President Bush declared his position in a raging battle over gay marriage. The compassionate conservative announced his support for the Federal Marriage Amendment, which would limit marriage to a union between a man and a woman.

His announcement, which responds to events in Massachusetts and San Francisco, reflects many of the irrational fears and fallacies behind anti-gay marriage arguments.

He states, “after more than two centuries of American jurisprudence and millennia of human experience, a few judges and local authorities are presuming to change the most fundamental institution of civilization” and that a constitutional amendment to “prevent the meaning of marriage from being changed forever” is necessary to protect the “sanctity of marriage.”

Gay marriage isn’t about changing the rights and responsibilities of a marriage, instead it is about giving full equality and liberty to a group that has been unfairly denied access to the ultimate expression of commitment in our society.

The most frequent attack on gay marriages relies on the idea that the institution of marriage and the nuclear family has been a constant on which society’s order rests upon. The institution of marriage has gone through many definitions. Throughout history marriage has been denied based on discriminatory factors.

For example, in many countries, a Muslim is not allowed to marry outside of their faith and as recently as 1996, marriage was prohibited based on a physical handicap by the Roman Catholic Church.

In the United States anti-miscegenation laws prohibited interracial marriages as recently as 1967 when the Supreme Court overturned these laws in Loving v. Virginia. Bush’s argument that marriage is defined as the union between a man and a woman by a “millennia of human experience” is clearly negated by the discovery of the tomb of Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep in 1964, a same sex gay married couple, which dates to 2,500 BCE.

In his book, “Same Sex Unions in Premodern Europe,” John Boswell reports recently discovered evidence that the Catholic Church performed marriage ceremonies between same-sex partners. For those whose arguments lean toward the religious right, the Bible includes eight different types of marriage, which include polygamy, Leverite Marriage, and the forced marriage between a rapist and his victim.

Marriage has been redefined through time but has always included commitment, rights and responsibilities. Extending marriage to gays would not change any part of that nor weaken its values.

Marriage would extend America’s offer of liberty and freedom for all to gays and put into practice America’s emphasis on civil rights.

Just as slaves and interracial couples were denied the fundamental right to marriage, gay couples are currently facing an issue of discrimination and equality not of religion and morality. Modern critics argue that if we open up marriage to gays then surely polygamy, incest and bestiality would follow.

If these arguments sound familiar it’s because these scare tactics have been used before to argue against interracial marriages. Decades of interracial marriages have shown these arguments to be completely ridiculous and based on irrational fears.

It’s easy to talk about gay marriage in abstract political terms. For many Americans, this is bigger than a political discussion or a voting record—for these citizens, gay marriage is about rights denied.

The Federal Marriage Amendment would marginalize gay families and continue to treat them as second-class citizens. Gay families are people like Edward Balmelli who would like to recognize his partner as a beneficiary of his pension plan but cannot do so because his gay partner is not recognized by his state as a spouse.

Gary Chalmers and his partner are not able to obtain a family insurance policy through their employers because they are not married.

Gay couples are denied rights like Social Security survivor benefits upon the death of a partner, the right to family leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act, the right to make decisions on a partner’s behalf in a medical emergency, the right to stability, security, economic partnership and happiness.

In arguing for gay marriage, the Web site www.marriageequality.org cites multiple studies which have consistently shown that married people “live longer, have higher incomes and wealth, engage less in risky behaviors, eat more healthily and have fewer psychological problems than unmarried people” as opposed to any other relationship arrangement.

Doesn’t our Constitution guarantee all the pursuit of happiness? I think its time for you to read the Constitution again Mr. Bush.

— This columnist can be reached at collegian@csufresno.edu