Maaaahhhhwwwwwaaage

Today, California's highest court ruled that denying same-sex couples the right to marry is unconstitutional, granting loving, committed gay and lesbian couples the dignity and support their relationships have so long been denied.


Well, duh. I am a student of American history and The Law. I totally understand the opposition to gay marriage (while I do not sympathize with it, I think anti-gay rights people make their position very clear: they think it's immoral and since the government tries to prevent other immoral acts, like murder, they think it's the government's role to try to prevent this particular immoral act. There are quite a number of things wrong with this premise, namely: being gay is not universally considered immoral and even something as seemingly straight(ha!)forward as murder has its own exceptions). However, what people opposed to the legality of gay marriage fail to understand, beyond the whole civil rights issue (for further study, submit "right to privacy and the Constitution" to Google) is the legal issue of marriage.

Marriage is two-fold. On one side is the Church which represents the spiritual/religious side of marriage. However, the Church does not control marriage in this country. For example, you don't have to have a Christian church perform the ceremony to be married. Nor do you have to have a religious ceremony to be married. However, you DO have to follow certain legal formalities to be considered married (even to be considered common-law married).

The legal side of marriage is where the state comes in (not the federal government, dillweeds). The state's role, historically, is to uphold the contract of marriage. There are many traditional reasons the state became involved in marriage, but fundamentally it was to enforce the contract. The right to freedom of contract (basically, that consenting adults have the right to strike a bargain among themselves and expect that they can legally enforce their rights and the obligations of the other parties in a court of law) is one that I know opponents to gay marriage hold dear. Who doesn't? Can you imagine if you sold something to someone else under a contract, they took the item but refused to pay you, but a court told you you're SOL, contract or not? No! We rely on the government to enforce the agreement s we enter into.

Of course, illegal contracts are not upheld by the courts (so if you hire someone to kill your neighbor and sign a contract, the contract cannot be enforced). So opponents want to make gay marriage illegal. But there is no basis for doing so. So long as two adults consent, they can determine the nature of their relationship and it is the government's duty to honor the contract they form together.

I think instead, opponents of gay marriage should work on their churches. Churches have the right to determine whether to honor certain types of marriages. For example, the Catholic Church used to refuse to marry people who had been divorced (I think they've loosened up on this one, right?). But the state does not have the same power.

It used to. In the past, different states have made bi-racial marriages illegal. They have made family planning illegal. They have made certain sex acts illegal.

If people really thought about the implications of the government telling you who you can marry and define what your relationship should be --how many people would support that and be willing to apply it to their marriage?