At the risk of flying, rotten fruit, the question that was addressed, right or wrong, by the court was not about gay marriage at all, but the protected status of gay people. In this case the court decided that homosexuals belonged to the short list of protected classes that receive special treatment under the Constitution to thwart discrimination by the majority. This means that the ruling was that it did not matter what the will of the people was because it oppressed a protected group of people.
Do homosexuals belong in the protected class? I personally do not believe so, but the judges do. Do I believe that there should be a protected class under the Constitution? Ideologically I say no, but realistically it has been proven that there is a need in the US for such a provision. If those provisions did not exist blacks would still be facing segregation. Of course, the Bill of Rights is fairly explicit when it says that ‘all people’ are created equal, but we have shown that we will target groups as being less deserving of rights than other people. Special ‘laws’ keep popping up that state that group x can not do y or need to pay more for z.
Again, do homosexuals fall into this class? Does defining marriage as a union between male and female only constitute an oppression of male and male or female and female union? I don’t think so. The court did think so.
The bottom line though is what do we believe the legal value of marriage is in the US. As I stated before, the legal contract is no longer worth very much at all. The fight over who can and can not be ‘married’ by the state is overridden by the fact that marriage by the state means so very little.
The opposing sides of the issue are fighting an equality issue and not an issue about marriage at all. The group for homosexual marriage want homosexual unions to be viewed the same or equal to heterosexual marriage. They do not buy the different but equal notion of civil unions. The group against homosexual marriage does not want these unions to be of equal value. The anti-homosexual marriage group does not view a homosexual union/family as being valid but have sought a compromise through the civil union language. When I look at the argument in this perspective I think the homosexual group is being discriminated against as a group.
If our society view homosexuality as a normal condition of man through genetic makeup, as it has since the 70′s, then our society can not discriminate against them based on their homosexuality. This does fly against many of the religions in the US, including my own faith. But we must also remember that this does pave the way for polygamy, and every other union of peoples, animals, inanimate objects that you can imagine as long as the ‘rational, medical’ standing of those peoples as embracing a normal, genetic condition.
