I’ve seen alot of bumper stickers and posters going both ways on the subject, and I thought I’d officially voice my opinion one last time.<\/p>\n
In 40 days, Oregonians will have the opportunity to vote on the adoption of Constitutional Amendment 36, which would once and for all define ‘marriage’ as a “one man, one woman” situation, I.E., no same-sex marriages or other spousal recognition for same-sex couples in our state Constitution.<\/p>\n
Read on for my opinion.<\/p>\n
Marriage has for centuries been defined as man+woman, largely due to religious directives, but for other reasons as well. The most common ‘accepted’ idea of marriage is when a man+woman couple are in love with each other, they decide to join in marriage and forsake all other interests for the duration of the marriage. This is written as “’til Death do us part”, but we all know the definition of divorce.<\/p>\n
I have nothing against marriage. I also have nothing against same-sex couples enjoying the benefits (and responsibilities) of marriage, if they so desire.<\/p>\n
Now, our founding fathers had no idea what society would look like in 200 years, but they did make sure to put the following words into our Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”<\/p>\n
Seems to me that any mix of people wanting to be recognized as being ‘married’ would fall under that last bit.<\/p>\n
Marriage is currently defined as man+woman because the people who wrote the laws considered any other variation to be abhorrent. Homosexuality has been present since the dawn of Humanity, but has been considered an abomination in all but a very few nations throughout history. This is no longer the case. In Oregon, we have made it illegal to discriminate against anyone for their Race, Creed, disabilities or sexual orientation – why should we now go back on that and legally define in the Constitution that a marriage is only<\/em> a union of a man and a woman?<\/p>\n There are two parts to any marriage – the vows the people involved take to each other (which are not defined anywhere, and society has already accepted the idea of couples writing their own vows) and the legal domestic Partnership, which defines the legal joining of resources and debts. Society calls the whole thing a marriage, but when it gets right down to it, the only part that matters legally is the domestic partnership that officially makes the people involved of the same family, and thus responsible for the others.<\/p>\n Now, if a woman does the homemaker thing the same as any other ‘traditional’ wife, should she not be entitled to health care and other spousal rights just because her ‘husband’ lacks a Y chromosome? Should a man be denied the right to decide upon the medical treatment of his spouse, simply because that spouse has a Y chromosome? In all other respects, these couples live as any ‘traditional’ couple would, caring for and supporting each other, they just happen to be gay. This somehow makes them inferior? Bullshit.<\/p>\n As far as I am concerned, I think we should legally define ‘marriage’ as “a domestic partnership wherein the principal parties agree to combine their financial and legal responsibilities into a family unit, with the members of said unit gaining all the benefits of said union.” Notice there is not only no mention of gender, but no mention of numbers either. Call me progressive.<\/p>\n Vote no on Amendment 36.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There are two parts to any marriage – the vows the people involved take to each other (which are not defined anywhere, and society has already accepted the idea of couples writing their own vows) and the legal domestic Partnership Continue Reading →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-152","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/thecyberwolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/thecyberwolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/thecyberwolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thecyberwolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thecyberwolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=152"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/thecyberwolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/thecyberwolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thecyberwolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thecyberwolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}