Don’t mess with marriage

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What does that mean?

If you’re not supposed to mess with marriage, why would you go ahead and tell huge numbers of couples that they can’t get married? Isn’t that messing with marriage?

The trouble with the right wing marriage pose is that it seeks to protect the institution of marriage by messing with actual marriages.

Oh, but that’s not enough for the Catholic Archdiocese of Washington D.C. The Archdiocese is now threatening to withhold services for poor people if marriage equality legislation becomes law.

The D.C. City Council has responded with a great deal more dignity than the Catholic Church seems able to muster. Council members say that if the Catholic Church wants to stop being charitable, then the City Council will simply step forward and make up the difference itself, but it will not allow any organization’s threats to interfere with the constitutional rights of the citizens of D.C.

It’s a matter of the Constitution, see. The Constitution guarantees equal protection under the law to all people. That means that the law has to give everyone equal status, without discrimination. That includes same-sex couples. If heteros get to marry, then homosexual couples need to be given that same right.

No state has the right, through its legislature or through an electoral proposition, to overrule the Constitution’s equal protection clause. Prop 8 tries to do just that – and that’s what makes it an insult not just to same-sex couples, but to all Americans who believe in the freedoms and rights that the Constitution guarantees.

The scientific truth is that same-sex marriages are not really unnatural at all. There are many examples of same-sex reproduction in nature. In fact, in many species, three are no males at all – only females who breed with each other. Then there are hermaphrodites, like snails, and even fruit trees. Oh, the immorality!

Today there’s a report of research by Lindsay Young, a graduate student at the University of Hawaii. Her studies have included observations of lesbian albatrosses setting up long-term nesting relationships with each other that involve considerable physical intimacy.

Same-sex marriage occurs in nature, it seems. Therefore, same-sex marriage is natural. By the standards of right wing Republicans, that ought to mean that evangelical churches should start pushing Congress to make same-sex marriage legal across the United States.

How likely do you think that is it happen? Maybe the right wing Republicans’ efforts to deny equal protection under the law to same-sex couples doesn’t have a thing to do with what’s natural. Maybe they’re just jerks.