Senator Santorum's reasoning

I oppose the Federal Marriage Amendment. I take issue with Senator Santorum's insistence that this is about strong families.

Fact is, family is a concept greater than marriage. And to invalidate the half* of our nation's households that do not consist of a husband/wife is unconscionable.

Family is important. And the nation should occupy itself in discovering how to acknowledge, support, and nurture the evolution of families. Not in futile attempts to shoehorn the population into a single definition.

I have no particular interest in marriage, gay or otherwise. But I resent the implication that my family exists only if I have a spouse, of the opposite gender.

Fact is, the FMA is not about family, despite Santorum's spiel. It is only about the legal status of two adults, and the codified agreement between society and those two. (We'll skip the argument of why it should be only two for now.) Now, extending the agreement to male/male and female/female pairings does nothing to change the codified agreement between society and male/female pairings. Married heterosexuals lose nothing. Nor is any other couple's behavior or choices an influence on their spiritual bonding -- that is theirs, to them, as they define it, as it should be.

I'm being only partially facetious here: I suspect that for many, deep down, this antipathy is rooted in the (probably unconscious) notion that their marital status is "proof" that they're heterosexual...and that without the limitation on spouse gender, "I'm married" will no longer be evidence that they're not gay.

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*Married-couple families=54,493,232, Total households=105,480,101; married-couple families with children: 24% (2000 US census)

posted by Schaz @ 7/12/2004 07:20:00 PM