Amendment to Ban Gay Marriage
How often do you hear people complaining about their rights being taken away? I hear it everywhere I go. Smokers are upset that they cannot smoke in public places, especially bars, and how next they are going to make it illegal to smoke in your own house. Free speech advocates are outraged at “free speech zones” and that the right to speak out against your government is severely limited at the times when it is most needed, during tragedy and war-times.
People all over the country are repeating terms like, “back in my day we could…” and “my father would be rolling in his grave…” and “The government is legislating on every aspect of my life…” But most people only care when they are directly affected, and blindly support other moves to massacre American freedom as it was meant to be by not being outraged EVERY SINGLE TIME.
48 Senators voted to close debate and vote on the amendment, in effect voting for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage in the United States. In order to continue on with the process that number needed to be 60, and 67 to actually pass the amendment. Nearly half of our most prestigious elected legislative body voted to strip a portion of our citizenry of the right to proclaim their love for each other and get state and national recognition of that proclamation. Now, you can make an argument that the law should have nothing to do with the love between two people, and I would wholeheartedly agree, but if you make marriage a legally binding contract, than you had better make sure that you ensure, to all parties, a right to enter into that contract.
If you are concerned that marriage is defined as a union of a man and a women you can (1) change the definition (We do it all the time, and if enough people use it Merriam Webster will even update the word in the dictionary if you are really worried about being contextually accurate.) and (2) use a different word to refer to the unions between all people. This will also save you marriage success rate from its current plummet, because if no one is getting “married” they can’t fail!
Bush’s reasoning for his encouragement of the ban is to protect the sanctity of marriage. If you are concerned about the divorce rate then ban legal marriage altogether, if no one can married, then no one can get divorced. A gay marriage ban will not make those numbers go down. “All over the country, married heterosexual couples are shaking their heads and wondering how exactly the prospect of gay marriage threatens the health of their marriages,” said Senator Russell D. Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin. (quoted in NY Times, 06/07/06)
Many couples attribute the problems in their marriage to money, but I don’t think Bush is all too eager to help them in this respect. In New Orleans, after natural disaster displaced millions and tore apart families, Bush was not concerned with the familial health and stability. In an already difficult situation, he actually figured out a way to make it worse, his obsession with Capitalism and his confusion about an economic system and our government (we see this all too often) made it impossible to do anything but make money. Instead of allowing the local people, whose homes and businesses were just destroyed, to rebuild their lives (such as the construction companies) Halliburton got the contract. The problem dear President is money. It is the root of marital disputes all too often, and it is the root of misguided politicians who averaged a C- in economics.
But many people do not care about the gay marriage ban, because some part of them feels as though it (homosexuality) is wrong. This is a huge mistake. The rights at some point are no longer being stripped from “them,” it soon will be you, and you will have cheered your politicians into it, or sat in silence. We should be outraged EVERY time!