Sarah has been collecting opinions on Bush’s position.
I have my own opinion, which I sent to her and she posted (no access to the blog at work). This is an issue that brings out the worst in all of us because of the emotion involved. That has to be stripped away to come to any clear conclusion, but some will not do that because emotion is all they have in defense.
We have to look at what marriage is. It is an emotional and spiritual commitment between two people. Period. Its legitimacy has sometimes been used for other reasons, as when a princess was married off to secure an alliance, or when someone has used it to acquire a green card. Both of those are political uses of a social contract. Neither is really marriage.
Civil unions are not marriage. It doesn’t matter whether the couple are man and woman, or man and man. Marriage is not a civil issue. If it were, most marriages prior to the 20th century were void, and we are all bastard children. Prior to that, a couple wanting to get married visited their local priest, rabbi, or pastor, talked it over with him, and scheduled a ceremony to express their commitment in front of family and friends. Or, they simply held their own ceremony without any church involvement. Some simply lived together, which is where the concept of common-law marriage comes from. Culture dictated that these people were married. Many cultures in this world still operate this way. When a man and woman get married in the US, they also include a ceremony for a civil union by signing the marriage license.
In my view, homosexual couples who commit themselves to one another through public ceremony are doing nothing more than what they are free to do, and what heterosexual couples do as well. Neither has a right to get married.
Unfortunately, government got involved. After all, there was money to be made by licensing marriage, and a level of cultural control. Once that happened, people began demanding restrictions on marriage such as age, race, and number of spouses. All these were codified rather than being dealt with within society and culture.
Then we got even more government involvement with inheritance, employer responsibilities, tax rates, etc. None of which was good. Sure, it did some good for certain individuals, but not for society overall. And that is what the Constitution was written to provide for, “the Common Good.”
The issue is not whether gay couples can marry. They have already been doing it for years. What they want is government sanction of a civil union, something that will give them access to benefits provided by the government-benefits which are probably unconstitutional to begin with.
There is no need for an Amendment unless the government wants to define Civil Union. Government can’t determine marriage because that institution exists in people’s hearts.