I’m happy for you in the strength of your marriage relationship, and may it continue to grow with each passing year, but my concerns are more toward the institution of marriage itself. Your relationship may not have been affected by the legalization of same-sex marriage, but marriage as an institution has been profoundly affected.

I was married in this state before the legalization of gay marriage. Then legalization took place, and far from my marriage being profoundly effected, my marriage remained the same stable bedrock of love and commitment that it was before legalization. All your theories to the contrary, the strength and value of my marriage did not rely on other people not getting married. It is still very much what I signed up for (after all, my wife didn’t suddenly become a man; same-sex marriage was not made mandatory.)

But then we would have to come back to the question of “what is marriage?” What is its definition? What are we saying when we say we’re married? If anyone can marry anybody with no parameters then what have you really got? I’ll tell you what you’ve got. You’ve got nothing. If marriage can be anything to anyone then it means nothing.

When my wife and I got married we made a commitment to each other based on the historical traditional definition of marriage. Now you’re saying equality dictates that marriage be radically redefined to include something that I didn’t sign up for. Now maybe that doesn’t mean anything to you, Nat G., but it certainly does to me.

But I find it unconvincing. My marriage to my wife is not redefined when to other people marry, even if it’s two other people I don’t think should get married. It’s still my commitment to her, and hers to me.

Here’s the problem with your analogy. Allowing everyone the opportunity to worship whatever god they choose in no way redefines my worship. And allowing everyone the opportunity to say whatever they want to say in no way redefines what I say. But allowing people to marry whomever or whatever they please does in fact radically redefine marriage for everyone. Like it or not, that is the real issue at stake.

Marriage is an inherently hetersexual union and has always been a union between men and women. Marriage has been expressed through the form of monogamy, though:
Polygamy — the union of one man and several women — has been the historical norm; and
Polyandry — the union of one woman and multiple men — though much rarer, is not unheard of.

Jack Kerwick makes these very points in his article, “The Oxymoron of “Gay Marriage”.” It’s online and easy to find.

“Same-Sex Civil Marriage” — your term — is an oxymoron.

Nat G., if you want to change the definition of marriage, I’m a voter who will certainly oppose you. That might matter little to you, but of much worse consequence, the God of the Bible condemns you.

Yet, I’m guessing you don’t believe in the God of the Bible, or that the Bible is inerrant, correct?

That may be a point of view; I don’t think it’s a straw man. Would we all be said to have equal religious rights if we were all merely free to worship Allah with as much love as we have in our hearts? Of course not. Do we have equal rights to speech if I’m free to say what I want to say and you’re free to say only what I want to say? No. The limitation of only being allowed to member someone of the opposite sex is no limitation for those who are only interested in the opposite sex; it is a limitation solely on those who are interested. Those are not equal.

You may argue there is a reason for unequal rights; there are certainly plenty of occassions where we legitimately give people different levels of rights. But I cannot agree that the question of equal rights is a mere straw man in this case.

Let’s talk about straw men, shall we? Sean Penn’s reference to “signs of hatred” was unmistakable and the implication was pretty clear. It is a straw man to imply that everyone who voted for Proposition 8 is just like Fred Phelps and his band of lunatic fringe church people. It is also a straw man to assert that disallowing same sex marriage is a denial of equal rights. No one’s right to marry has been denied. What the people of California have done (not once but twice now) is to reaffirm the historical traditional definition of marriage as being between a man and woman. If anything’s been denied here it’s the ability of a small minority of people to revolutionarily change the definition of everyone else’s marriage.

Jude 3 “earnestly contend”