May 21 2009
Gay marriage, free speech, and religion: how it all fits together.
I live in California, where the battle for legalization of gay marriage continues to rage on. Most recently, our own Miss California was thrown into the limelight for giving her views on gay marriage. The controversy surrounding her opposition to gay marriage brings up several issues for me.
First of all, I believe gay marriage should be legal. Why? I’m not gay myself, nor do I have any homosexual family members. But I simply see no legal reason why it should be banned. I’ve heard all of the arguments of why they should not be allowed to marry, and I have not found one legal reason why they should be banned. The only “legitimate” reasons have to do with religion.
Now, don’t get me wrong- I do respect religious people and their beliefs. My entire family is extremely conservative and very religious. Both they and Miss California have every right to their opinions and beliefs, but to try to create laws and bans based on that starts us on a very slippery slope that no one should want to go down. Oh, I’m sure it’s fine right now, since it’s mainstream Christianity we’re basing this ban on. But if you allow the Christian conservative right to create laws based on their beliefs, where does it end? Could this possibly be used to set some sort of precedent to allow the introduction of Sharia law or something similar down the road? Honestly, I can’t see why not; after all, if we allow one religion to create laws in our society, how could we discriminate against other ones?
So what would be a viable and acceptable solution then? Obviously, some sort of compromise needs to be struck here; churches really should not be forced to go against their practices, and beauty queens should be allowed to voice their opinions even if it differs from the judges’ beliefs (by the way, shouldn’t a beauty pageant be about beauty, not politics, anyway?). Why not allow gay marriage, but also allow churches to have the option of not performing them if it does not coincide with their beliefs? There are some churches who do not oppose gay marriage, and gay couples wishing to have religious ceremonies could have them performed there perhaps.
There must be a way to give people equal rights without forcing the opposing group to go against their belief system.
Hi, this is a comment.
To delete a comment, just log in, and view the posts’ comments, there you will have the option to edit or delete them.