Equality does not tarnish the ‘sanctity’ of marriage

At press time, the Supreme Court hasn’t released their ruling on the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act, a 1996 law that sets the Federal definition of marriage as one woman, one man.  The discussions across respective sides of the issue have been heated in the past few days, and there are no shortages of opinions.

But let us focus on the one viewpoint that argues marriage as a religious institution, the sanctity of which shouldn’t be tarnished.  That sentiment is nice, and it gives straight couples that go through the rite as a religious experience the solace that what they are doing is something larger than either person involved, that it is two people becoming one under the eyes of God.

However, it’s more complicated than a rite.  Not all marriages in this nation are granted by a pastor in a church; any man and woman can walk into a court house, fill out a piece of paper, and they are married.  Notice how married was not placed in quotation marks?

That’s because a courthouse marriage is considered the same in the eyes of the law, the state, and the IRS as the sanctified sacrament that people receive in a church.

The rapture hasn’t come, and courthouse marriages don’t seem to affront and anger your respective gods, nor do they signal the decline of our society.  How then can we use the word marriage for two different practices, but still have it mean the same thing in the eyes of the law?

The way that the law is currently structured favors two people, regardless of whether love is a factor, to enter into a secular marriage.  This allows for them to reap the benefits of such an arrangement, from taxes, to default life-insurance payments to spousal hospital visits and other things written immediately into the slew of other acts that our law provides.

The “sanctity” of marriage undoubtedly belongs in a church, that very sanctity is a lofty ritual for many religions, and is often explicitly stated as union of man and wife.  Nothing in the law makes God recognize a justice of peace’s ruling inside the sepulcher, and validates that sanctity for you.

So why then oppose marriage equality for same-sex couples?  It’s not the same thing as your trusted and sanctified ritual, and similar legal acts have done nothing to corrupt or invalidate.

So it seems like only common sense that two people who actually love each other should be afforded the exact same rights and the exact same responsibility to each other in a contract, either in the eyes of God or the eyes of the law, regardless of what their gender might be.