The US Supreme Court ruled in favor of same sex marriage… as it should have been always.
The Court’s ruling was greeted with the #LoveWins hashtag and I do agree this is a win, a huge, hard-won and well deserved win.
I also happen to think, though, we haven’t reached the marriage equality goal just yet — there are some steps to be taken:
I think the government should get out of the marriage business entirely and that all “marriages” should be contracts between two or more consenting adults of any combination of sexes, with the terms, privileges, responsibilities, duration, etc spelled out in writing, and disputes arbitrated under standard contract law.
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[W]hy is the reason two people choose to live together, sign a contract together or have sex with each other any business of the government’s? I find the notion that a contract of mutual economic interdependence can only be drawn up between two people who boink each another to be just as inane, irrational and offensive as same-sex marriage proponents consider the notion that those two parties must be of opposite sexes. For example, why can’t two heterosexuals of the same sex make a contract to pool their resources, share insurance, secure inheritance, etc, without having to pretend they sleep together? Traditionally, marriages were given special rights to protect minor children, not to confer a special state sanction on people sticking their body parts into one another’s orifices; since many couples (hetero- or homosexual) nowadays choose to remain childless, why does it matter whether they have sex? And please, don’t yammer about “love”; not only is it totally legal to marry for money or other practical concerns, I also think it’s a bit hypocritical for a government which spends billions trying to keep some people from getting high to subsidize others making life-altering decisions while under the influence of mind-altering chemicals, merely because those chemicals happen to originate inside their own bodies. Furthermore, it’s highly discriminatory to subsidize only sexual love, but not fraternal love.
Governments have no right to set any limits on relations between consenting adults. They should not be able to bar people from having sex, nor to require that parties to certain contracts must have sex. They do not have the right to control the gender, number, acts, frequency, duration, terms, reasons, compensation, or any other factors between adults who do choose to have sex, nor to harass them for their choices. And they certainly don’t have the right to declare that sexual relationships are only for people who are “in love”, or to give special preferences to those who are. Though Western tradition of the last couple of centuries increasingly frowns upon marriages contracted for reasons other than romantic love, it is not the state’s place to enact such mores into law any more than it would have been its place a century ago to legally require all wheeled vehicles to be drawn by horses. Sammy Cahn was right; love and marriage do go together exactly like a horse and carriage: traditionally associated, but not the only conceivable arrangement, and perhaps not even the best one.
Maybe it’s time we acknowledge that the reasons between a man and a woman, or the reasons between a same-sex couple for getting married shouldn’t get a different legal status than the reasons between three men, or those between three women and two men or any other kind of configuration you can think of.
It’s about time marriage stops being a couples’ thing. It’s about time marriage stops being exclusively about love.
Now, that‘s marriage equality.
(image: Wikipedia)
