The Scrawl at the End of the Hall

Gay Marriage? Why?

For the first time I have actually seen a half-decent argument against gay marriage.

I read the article in entitled, "Marriage: who needs it anyway?", by Russell Smith. I thought it was going to be an article slamming the ideal of marriage and The One Big Love. It is, sort of, but not in the way I expected.

Douglas Farrow, a McGill University professor right here in Montreal, suggests that allowing gay marriages will ultimately lead to the abolition of legal marriage, because it will lead to questions of what business the state has in defining what unions are. I think that's a good point.

Anti-gay activists and protesters usually cite the Bible as a reference for why it is a terrible thing (it=all things homosexual). So why, then, does the state have any say in it at all? What happened to the separation of church and state? Why is marriage a legal term when it is supposedly about religion?

It's because legal marriage isn't about love, or God, or any kind of virtue or sacrament. It isn't even about life together. It's about life after the marriage. Divorce. It's about protecting people (I could say, just women, or just men, but that's a whole other discussion; it's definitely gender-biased one way or the other), or more specifically, protecting assets and supposedly children. I mentioned children last deliberately. The state knows it has nothing to say about how people conduct their marriages (or dating), but it has everything to say about splitting assets and children when it's all over.

Seeing as how it has nothing to say about the actual marriage, why should it have anything to say about who gets married, other than legal age? What is different about such a marriage other than the sex (or lack of it) between the partners? It has supposedly already been determined that Ottawa has no right to legislate what happens in the bedrooms of Canadians, Trudeau said so.

But if you believe that marriage is a holy sacrament between a man and a woman, then you shouldn't have the right to have that kind of union sanctioned by the state IN ANY WAY, because the state has absolutely nothing to do with religion. This means that if you don't believe that gays should have the right to marry, then you should believe that no one does. Marriage as a legal concept only should have absolutely no problem with who gets married. As a doubter of the moral validity of marriage, (and as a person living in Quebec, marriage is something you do after 15 years, a couple of kids and a few thousand bucks you happen to have just lying around, where women do not automatically take the name of their husband) I also doubt the legal validity of it.

And that is why gays should not get married.