Donald Sensing just saved me a lot of typing.
All of which is to say that the accidental characteristics of marriage – love, affection, property and other rights – spring from what marriage is rather than define what marriage is. Therefore, whatever relationship homosexuals may have with one another, and whatever legal rights civil authority may confer upon them, marriage is inherently – indeed, metaphysically – the province only of men and women united in matrimony.
Agreed. I have not found an argument to support the extension of legal marriage to include same-sex couples that I could not use in equal measure to demand the right to marry my sister.
Being of the same gender, society’s interest in the health of potential offspring is nullified – though it can also be argued that removing the ability to procreate as a defining property of marriage opens the door pretty wide. I don’t know how you can arbitrarily set aside something as fundamental as procreation to broaden the definition of marriage to include homosexual relationships, but stick it back in to narrow that same definition to exclude incestuous ones.
If it is discriminatory to deny persons the right to legally marry on the basis of same-sex orientation (be it choice or chance), is it not equally discriminatory to deny persons the right to marry on the basis of sexual ambivilance? Being homosexual or heterosexual is not a product of having sex with a person of the same or opposite gender, or having sex at all! Celibacy, whether voluntary or involuntary, does not affect orientation.
(Indeed, the entire discussion of sexual orientation is a red herring. This issue rests on gender, not orientation. Same-sex orientation has never been used to deny a man or woman the right to marry a person of the opposite sex.)
This is not a frivolous suggestion. It’s not uncommon for siblings to live their entire adult lives together, to share incomes, property, to support, comfort, care for, love and commit to each other. Why should such a couple be denied the societal benefits afforded to other such couples – pension benefits, spousal deductions. That they may or may not be having sex is no one’s business but their own.
As Pierre Trudeau remarked many years ago when he started us down this long slippery road, “The state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation.”
Either we take the father of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms at his word, or we don’t.
Feb 26: take a trip round the Beltway for more.