Justice for All

This week's Savage Love column is brilliant of course, but the comments section in particular has some great thoughts on the gay marriage issue. I especially liked this one:

@27--"Isn't marriage fundamentally a religious institution?" Simply put, it isn't. There are a whole host of legal rights and responsibilities that a modern civil marriage grants. Off the top of my head: Next of kin benefits, the right of the spouse to be the one to make the crucial medical decisions when one becomes incapacitated. Survivor benefits, when you die, most workplaces have to pay your spouse some bucks. No spouse, no $$. You can't just unilaterally call it quits on your husband or wife and leave him or her out in the cold. When you marry, your spouse's kids more or less automatically become your kids, you have a stake in how they're raised.

And there're a lot more purely legalistic reasons why denying gays the right to marry is fundamentally legally discriminatory, and therefore in clear violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment to the US Constitution. It's not about religion, it's about justice. Liberty and justice for all.

Furthermore, "religion" itself doesn't unite with one voice to say anything about gay people. Yes, a lot of, perhaps most, discrete Christian sects are well behind the curve in their approach to gay rights, but not all. Unitarians are fully accepting of gays. Some Lutherans and Methodists are getting on board the big gay love bus. My own Episcopal church is busily tearing itself apart over the issue...