Wednesday, July 02, 2008
What love's got to do with it
From the RoundTable blog
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Dick Bauman
Bauman is the co-chairman for Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays for Blacksburg and the New River Valley. He lives in Blacksburg.
Jim Ludington's commentary "Gay marriage threatens our culture" (June 29, Horizon) raises again the grim specter of American culture threatened by marriage between two persons of the same gender.
He progresses from gay marriage to polygamy to pedophilia to "no legal standing against any form of perversion." The very foundation of our nation will crumble as "activist judges destroy the basis of our culture, and indeed, our civilization."
The final comparison is to Nazi Germany, where good people stood by while the nation fell into depravity.
Good grief. Chicken Little has run amok. Who knew that gay people had such power?
Court and legislative decisions in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Vermont, Connecticut, New Jersey, Oregon, Washington and California have granted the right to marriage, recognition of marriage, broad family recognition, civil union or domestic partnership for same-sex couples. These decisions have recognized that the concept of equal rights applies to everyone, not just those who by circumstance of birth are attracted to someone of the opposite sex.
Conferring the same legal benefits to married gay couples as married straight couples is justice. If "activist" means judges are in favor of justice, I'm all for it. The U.S. Government Accountability Office in 2004 found 1,138 federal responsibilities and benefits accruing to marital status.
Massachusetts and California so far are the only states with full marriage status available to gays, though broad-family-recognition laws grant many rights.
Full justice, though, would mean full rights. Ludington hopes and prays these rights will not be recognized in Virginia for those gay couples united in other states. Building barricades among us does not well serve the human community.
The value of a person is not determined by sexual orientation, nor is the quality of a family decided by the differing gender of the parents. Gay people, like straight people, can be good or bad, or like most of us, somewhere in between. As parents, they can be loving, kind, and exempalry of good character and high moral standards -- or not.
If there is the potential for demise of the American family, it will not come because of same-sex marriage. Heterosexual parents in America haven't exactly made the mold for marriage excellence. Divorce happens, like spousal and child abuse, in families of all persuasions. Gay marriage can strengthen families by providing two loving and care-giving parents by adoption to children who have no family, or by combining split families. It can be the tie that binds for committed couples.
Ludington longs for the time long ago when "only the church officiated over family and personal events." And what a mess the church in all its forms can make of personal matters, given the current chasms created by the issue of gay marriage within families in many faiths. Why should the church, with all its variant dogma and doctrines, politics and hierarchy, be the arbiter of personal lives?
Waving red flags and crying "havoc" about gay marriage are tactics of fear-mongering, and we've had more than enough of that. For those who believe in a loving God or a beneficent force guiding the universe, providing legal support and structure for our fragmented lives through a formal union of loving souls should be a good thing.
