“They [the Washington State Supreme Court] said lawmakers had a rational reason for limiting marriage to people of the opposite sex. Only those couples are biologically capable of having children, and keeping them together is generally best for children.” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, July 26, 2006
My partner’s brother is marrying his high school sweetheart this week. This wedding has been a long time coming, as they graduated from high school 40 years ago and are in their late Fifties. Odds are they won’t be having any children, unless there is a Visitation from the Archangel Gabriel, as biologically that just isn’t possible anymore. But they’re getting married anyway. I’m happy for them.
Following the logic of the Washington State Supreme Court, though, they have no right to be doing this. The purpose of denying marriage to gay people is that they are biologically incapable of producing a child. But then again, so are Greg and Jan. So why can they get married?
One simple reason: prejudice.
The pathetic attempts of the New York and Washington State Supreme Courts to cover this simple fact up in their recent rulings doesn’t pass muster since, as one judge I know put it, “any fourteen year old could pick apart the reasoning in those decisions.” We let all kinds of straight people who can’t reproduce get married and demand no evidence that they are biologically capable of doing so (or intend to do so, should they be biologically capable) before handing them a marriage license. Since plenty of gay people have children (one study showed that lesbians in their thirties were just as likely to have children as their straight counterparts) and preserving the stability of families for the good of the children is the supposed “rational” motive of current marriage laws, logic would dictate extending marriage equality to any couple that has children – even if they are same sex couples. The New York state court even admitted that there was no concrete evidence that opposite-sex headed families are better for children than same-sex headed ones, but that they thought they were and that was enough. The gigantic holes in these arguments (and I could go on, believe me) show that this isn’t a decision based on logic or fact. It’s based on the fact that these judges just aren’t willing to give first-class citizenship to same sex couples. Nothing more.
In a way, I respect the extreme right more on this one. At least they’re honest: they think being gay should cause you to be given second class citizenship. They don’t try to pretend anything else motivates them. Straight is better and they want that written into our laws. The judges in New York and Washington State however – being supposedly educated and rational people – couldn’t own up to this kind of thinking. So they invented specious arguments to justify their decisions. Shame on them.
When the big debate over defending the “sanctity of marriage” erupted in 2004, my partner came up with the perfect answer to these so-called “defense of marriage” initiatives: restrict marriage to opposite sex couples – who, in order to preserve its sanctity, may not then get divorced or live apart for the remainder of their lives. Oh, and make adultery a felony, too. You’d see most straight people turn out in droves to vote against that. And the fact that those proposing to defend marriage’s “sanctity” make no demands on straight people to uphold its “sanctity” shows just how big of liars most of them are. They don’t care about any kind of heterosexual “sanctity”: they just want to shut gay people out.
The judges in New York and Washington State have written rulings that will go down with Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson, and Korematsu vs. the United States as examples of bigotry masquerading as jurisprudence. They will be repudiated and reviled by future generations. My only hope is that, like Strom Thurmond, they live long enough to see it happen.