I chose this picture of a few forlorn rose petals in the sun after a wedding in Sitges to bring up my disappointment over the vote today by the California Supreme Court on Proposition 8. I truly don’t understand it.
How can the government have the power to pass a moral judgment on the validity of your love for another person? By upholding measures that deny gay people the right to marry, the government is deeming their feelings and their basic rights as irrelevant, unworthy, and wrong. On what basis does the government have the authority, wisdom, and ethical sensibility to base this judgment?
Why not ban people from marrying each other if they have only known each other for a few days, if they have been married before, if they are a certain difference in weight or height, if they have ever been in prison, if they are both sterile, if one person has voted and the other person has not, if they don’t pay their taxes….all of this seems just as arbitrary to me in the face of making a decision about with whom you want to share your life and love. I say that anyone prepared follow through with such an important commitment deserves to have their union recognized by their government. All the objections seem to be purely religious in nature. What about the separation of church and state? The 1st Amendment? The 9th Amendment? Or the fact that the constitution never actually mentions marriage?
Why have we not come to a point in our growth as a species when we realize that our complexities go far beyond what our ideas of nature, religion, and history are able to explain?
In light of all of this, here is a sweet article about a lesbian couple marrying in Connecticut.
For the record, Spain, despite its large Catholic population, legalized full marriage rights for gay couples in 2005.
