MARRIAGE EQUALITY-With a present divorce rate in California of 55% and comparably high levels of divorce around the country, I don't see how gays and others, presently still excluded by some states from the institution of marriage, could possibly do any worse than heterosexual fellow citizens have with the institution of marriage, where the majority of couples now part long before death.
It is hard to share the concerns evinced last week by Supreme Court's Justice Anthony Kennedy about "altering an institution" of marriage as the gay marriage controversy finally heats up before the U.S. Supreme Court in an attempt to reconcile conflicting state laws that presently either allow or continue to ban homosexual unions.
What somehow continues to elude being addressed in this latest pitched battle of the culture wars is not marriage as "an institution so deeply rooted in history and religion," but rather the fundamental constitutional right of any individual to equal protection before the law irrespective of their sexual orientation.
What should be the exclusive issue of constitutional rights seems to have been lost on both sides of the debate over gay marriage, where taking intransient mutually exclusive positions in uncompromising opposition to the other side seems to obliterate the objective goals of both sides on the gay marriage issue, which could be resolved if both sides were not more concerned about shoving their position down the throats of the other side instead of going their own ways in peace.
Those opposed to gay marriage or anything beyond what is clearly their intolerant and limited view of what are acceptable unions get into specious arguments of state’s rights and majority rules to hide their true feelings that gay marriage is abnormal and a perversion. The disingenuous nature of this position has become more and more evident as the majority on this issue over the last ten years has now shifted to a majority of people in this country favoring or being indifferent to gay marriage.
{module [1177]}
On the pro-gay marriage side, people who have been vilified for ages are still stubbornly trying to prove something. They not only want equal civil rights- those that exist in the institution of marriage- they also want the acceptance of people who will clearly never give it to them.
It is for this reason I would propose what up until now has been the failed notion of "separate but equal," that in the context of racially unsegregated right to a public education remains an unmitigated failure- see LAUSD with its continuing 90% Latino and African American population that clearly do not get the excellent and rigorous education that predominantly White or rich get in private education.
What would be different about separate but equal applied to marriage is that the substance of what we presently call marriage is not supplied and paid for by the state as it is in the field of public education. Rather its value- if any- is determined by those who enter into and define their own private relationship.
Clearly, the sanctity and value of what people would do as married would be shown by what courts presently decide in divorce case, where the proceeding are limited by law to dividing the community property and taking care of minor children.
If you could be either married or let's say "marryed", you could leave the clearly failed institution of tradition marriage to the remaining 45% with either objectively good marriages... or tolerated marriages base on inertia, while carving out a new institution of being marryed, where gay or straight might try to reinvigorate the concept of people living together in a committed relationship.
(Leonard Isenberg is a Los Angeles observer and a contributor to CityWatch. He’s a second generation teacher at LAUSD and blogs at perdaily.com. Leonard can be reached at [email protected] )
-cw
