There are those who have tried to declare that the battle to preserve marriage is bigotry. They argue that people need to be tolerant, and people should be allowed to do whatever they want. This, of course, completely negates the need for government. The United States does not allow people to do anything they want, nor do they guarantee happiness. Even in the realm of marriage, the United States has always had rules about who can marry, and gay rights activists have generally not complained about these. For instance, polygamy is illegal, and even today, people are being arrested for practicing polygamy. We also don’t allow people under a certain age to marry and we don’t allow adults to marry children or younger teenagers. We require licenses and tests before marriages occur in most places.
We, as a nation, have always had a vested interest in deciding what constitutes an appropriate marriage relationship, and few have felt it was discriminatory. It’s simply setting standards. There are, for example, no scientific reasons for listing the age of eighteen as the age of adulthood or for deciding adults should not marry children. This is a decision we make as a society, and it is, in fact, a recent decision. In Texas, thirteen-year-olds could marry until a few years ago. Today, we’ve randomly chosen eighteen as the age of adulthood and applied it to marriage. The age could just as easily have been twenty-five or thirty, but we chose eighteen and don’t consider it discriminatory towards seventeen year olds. And so, society has always considered it in their best interest to make rules about marriage, because marriage is really never just between two people. The circumstances of any given marriage affect all of society, and this issue is no different than any other standard the nation has set for marriage. It is simply society’s choice as to how they want marriage defined.
The Church has stated: “Allegations of bigotry or persecution made against the Church were and are simply wrong. The Church’s opposition to same-sex marriage neither constitutes nor condones any kind of hostility toward gays and lesbians. Even more, the Church does not object to rights for same-sex couples regarding hospitalization and medical care, fair housing and employment rights, or probate rights, so long as these do not infringe on the integrity of the traditional family or the constitutional rights of churches.” The Church has said they don’t oppose any other rights or civil union decisions. Their entire focus is on the word marriage, which is a sacred institution. Marriage was ordained by God and therefore, as the creator of the principle, only He can make the rules. This is the religious standpoint. From a non-religious standpoint, there are other arguments based simply on semantics and tradition.
Even many gay rights activists often feel marriage should be left alone, and the focus should be on civil unions for them. Elton John, a very well-known gay singer, has spoken in favor of leaving marriage be. His voice, joined by others in the gay community who have said the same thing, demonstrate it is not bigotry, but simply a definition of terms, and a definition many homosexuals are quite comfortable with. Just as we use specific terms to designate those who are gay and those who are not, we can use specific terms to describe types of relationships. It is merely defining terms from a legal standpoint.
This is commonly done in government. A homeschool is legally defined differently than a public school and this is not discrimination—it’s a definition—and the two types of schools are treated entirely differently by the government—something most liberals support. A foster child is legally defined differently than an adopted child, even if the foster child stays with the same family his entire life. He will not, for instance, automatically inherit, but must be specifically named in a will by his foster parents. In our legal system, people are consistantly defined in very specific ways, not in a desire to discriminate, but in a desire to define.
Some have argued civil unions don’t carry the same protections as marriage. This is a problem with the civil union laws and not with the marriage laws. People who use this as their argument need to go to work strengthening the civil union laws so they are equivalent.
There is nothing discriminatory in setting standards, something every nation must do, or in defining terms and setting limits for each definition. Nations, including the United States, have always defined terms and applied laws to those terms, and this is nothing more than defining the terms of marriage and civil unions.
