Letters to the Editor
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New Yorkers Need to End Their Discrimination
Ontario, Quebec and Massachusetts -- New York's immediate neighbours -- have had marriage equality for about three years. Many thousands of gays and lesbians have been married there with zero impact on heterosexual relationships. Marriage equality hasn't affected heterosexual marriage rates, heterosexual divorce rates or heterosexual birth rates. That's a fact. How did the judges manage to overlook that?
Judge Smith and the majority are entitled to claim that discriminating against gays and lesbians is an inducement to heterosexuals to get married but that claim strikes me as pure nonsense.
This decision does nothing more than mock the dignity of homosexual relationships and homosexual people. It forces families with gay and lesbian parents to live in less stable legal arrangements. It reduces their benefits. It makes it harder on their kids and it opens them up to abuse at the hands bigots. In short it forces people to live in second-class families. And the court says that all this is okay because if you treat gays and lesbians in a discriminatory manner then this will somehow induce straight people to get married. I've never heard such foolishness in my life.
What really happened here is the four jurists in the majority didn't have the courage to exercise their responsibility. It was their job -- not the legislature's -- to ensure that all New Yorkers were treated equally under the law.
Heterosexuals would not have lost one single right in a favourable ruling and homosexuals would have been brought into the family and treated as equal citizens. It was a no-brainer but the judges were afraid and they shirked their responsibility. Nobody can accuse them of being activist judges. Nor can they be accused of acting responsibly.
I wholeheartedly agree with dissenting justices Kaye and Ciparick. Any heterosexual couple that would choose to marry or have kids merely because it is legal in NY to discriminate against gays and lesbians is not acting rationally in the first place. Discriminating against gays and lesbians is not a rational inducement for heterosexual marriage. And even if it were an inducement -- to the KKK and Focus on the Family types -- it still wouldn't be rational.
A democracy isn't merely 'majority rule'. A majority cannot for instance vote to deny blonde people the right to get married. The courts are specifically in place to prevent a tyranny of the majority. That's the theory.
Everyone knows that New York State is socially behind some of its neighbours. The majority of people in New York still prefer to discriminate against gays and lesbians. We've all read the polls we know that New Yorkers are not ready to accept that all people are equal under the law. It's a sad thing but there you have it, that's how it is.
This is precisely why the court needed to act. But these four justices were too scared so they passed the buck. And they did so in one of silliest rulings I have ever read. I'm sure many jurists will be scratching their heads wondering what the hell these four judges were thinking. They sure as hell weren't thinking 'rationally' as this decision has 'fear' and 'cowardice' written all over it.
And I have to take a shot at Eliot Spitzer and Mayor Bloomberg. These two guys are first class cowards as well. On the one hand they claim to be 'for' marriage equality yet they are precisely the ones who brought this case forward. It was their agents that argued before the court that gays and lesbians should not be allowed to have equal rights. The Appellate Court simply agreed with their arguments.
These two hypocrites knew what they were doing was wrong and they went ahead and did it anyway. Compare their gutless behaviour with that of Mayor Newsome of San Francisco. Now there's a guy who knows how to stand up to injustice rather than just 'follow orders'. Spitzer and Bloomberg aren't fit to lick Newsome's boots.
You can bet that New York's neighbours in Ontario, Quebec and Massachusetts are shaking their heads wondering what happened. This is definitely a low point in New York's history. New Yorkers should consider changing their state's name from New York to New Alabama.
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Fuzzy stupid ideas that continue to circulate....
The idea that marriage is entirely a Christian invention, or was invented by the US government, is utterly a fallacy and yet it keeps coming up in bogus argument after bogus argument.
Marriage pre-dates Christianity, Judaism.....it pre-dates idol worship. It pre-dates any and every religion....it has been around, in some form that we would recognize, since the dawn of time. You can bet your last nickel that the Cro Magnon men who decorated the caves of Lasceaux were MARRIED...to WOMEN.
Marriage is not and has never been "a right". It is a privilege and it has always only been available to certain people under certain circumstances. While these circumstances vary from culture to culture and era to era (with some allowing cousins to marry, for example, and others banning cousin marriage as incest, etc.), there is only one absolute that distinguishes marriage from every other kind of relationship -- it is only and absolutely ALWAYS between men and women.
It is not that marriage necessitates childbirth -- it never could have, because in all population groups, at least 15% of people are naturally infertile (regardless of age). Marriage had to be bigger and more encompassing that simply childbearing, yet it is rooted in the inescapable fact that ONLY men and women can create children together out of their genetic material. This transcends rights and it transcends religion, whether we (in our "all inclusive" culture) like it or not. Every single solitary human being on the face of the earth is the product of the DNA exchange between a MAN AND A WOMAN. Every single solitary human being on the face of the earth, since the dawn of time, was gestated in the womb of a WOMAN. The vast majority (over 99%) were raised BY the woman who gestated them in her womb.
That we are in the process of throwing this rich biological heritage AWAY for fairly trivial sociological reasons (i.e., gays want to be just like straights) fills me with fear for the human race.
Ms. Miles, the author of the article, disturbs me with her whining about her daughter's "rights". Where were Katie's "rights" when her mother was being inseminated by a gay man, in an obvious attempt to get around the biological reality that two women (Ms. Miles and her lover) cannot now and will never be able to create a biological child out of their genetic material? The fact is that "laws" cannot turn two lesbian lovers into the biological parens of a child. I notice that Ms. Miles' partner and she seem not to have created the (easily available) legal documents to protect one another or Katie, nor has the partner bothered to adopt Katie. In fact, from the article, it would seem that the lesbian couple plus the gay biological father have formed what is basically a polygamous triad "marriage", albiet unrecognized by law.
Polygamous marriages, polygyny (multiple wives), incestuous marriage (why not? Don't incestuous couples have RIGHTS????), and so on are precisely the reason why the vast majority of Americans (heck, even the vast majority of Canadians, who had gay marriage forced on them by activist judges and who responded by replacing the ruling political party) are adamantly opposed to legalizing gay marriages. Gay marriage laws have been kicked to the curb by an average 69% of voters in all 11 states that had such issues on the ballot in 2004.....furthermore, for all the (mostly) progressive and liberal readers and letter-writers to Salon.com....the reason we have an incompetent, extreme neo-con President in office is 100% due to those same gay marriage issues and "renegade" self-appointed moralists like S.F. mayor Gavin Newcome (sp?) who put this issue upfront and in the public eye, when it was entirely undeserving of attention in light of the war in Iraq, global warming, the economy and every other critically important political concern of our day. Oh no, none of that matters, as long as we all support gay marriage!