Marriage is a contract, submitted to the state, and following the state's laws and paying a fee to recieve the state's recognition of that contract. The issue now is that some member's of our society must pass fundamentalist Christian values test as well to recieve state recognition of thier marriage, even if they do not prescribe to that particluar belief system. If this same standard was held to different parts of our society, there would be hell to pay. To make matters even more wrong in my opinion, there has been no provable reasons why gays should not marry and many provable reasons why they should be allowed to. This means supposed religiuos beliefs are now the only basis for law. Whe that "relifious belief" is shown to be based upon prejudice, it makes it even more difficult to see how these laws are allowed to be.
The very same arguements against gay marriage were used to justify laws against bi-racial marriages. Bi-racial marriages are now looked upon as fairly common. Anyone proposing a law against bi-racial marriage today would be looked at as a bigoted fool, yet the very same reasons were used to defend such prejudice in our history. If the arguements did not hold up then, why are we as a country so quick to give them credence now. This is nothing more than some people legislating thier own prejudice into law, so the rest of us have to abide by someone else's bigotry.
As a country, we want to pride ourselves on our rule of law and our somewhat reasoned approach on how ideas become laws in this country. Someone sees a legitimate need for a law. A reason a particular law would help a segment of our society. It then becomes voted on and if enough people agree, yes there is a need for this and yes it would be beneficial to have this law, its becomes law. In this case, there is not benefit to outlawing gay marriage. Married gays posses no risk to society by being married. It could be argued with the ability to marriage, gays would pose less harm. However, laws are being passed state to state that have no benefit of being passed, they are just a result of prejudice. That bothers me and makes me ashamed that so many are prejudiced as to think these laws are anything other than the bigotry they are.
Prejudice and bigotry should not be the basis for law, any law. If this becomes acceptable how will you argue against a law that uses those same markers to pass a law that effects you. Will you be satisfied to wait out bad laws like this if you are the target? I know moving to a different state has been mentioned. What if you are poor or have many many ties to the community. This becomes much more difficult. Then you are also moving due to the bigotry of others.
In my opinion, we should be doing all we can to support people having loving, monogomous relationships. Those things have a positive effect on society. We should be doing everything we can to keep prejusdice and bigotry from being alloed purchase in our society. Bigotry and prejudice are not postive influences on our society.
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