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Thomas Sowell's op-ed about the gay marriage bans

By Nancy Rapoport

After reading Thomas Sowell's op-ed about the recent election and the success of such measures as Proposition 8 in California (see here for his op-ed), I thought for a while about why I disagreed with him on this issue (see here).

For one thing, marriage can't just be about protecting the ability of a man and a woman to have children. My marriage doesn't include children, so either my husband and I don't deserve to have the protections afforded to married people, or something else must be going on in the institution of marriage to justify protecting people like us (childless by choice) as well as protecting people who want to have children, but can't. I suppose that one could argue that we could always decide to have children, so marriage is there to protect our "children potential" or that we could adopt children--but then, unless a state chooses to ban adoption by lesbians and gay men, the "children potential" of gay marriages is just as possible as our own "children potential" in my marriage.

The other argument--that banning gay marriage is different from banning inter-racial marriage--rests on the assumption, I think, that being a member of a particular race is immutable but that being gay or lesbian (or transgendered) isn't immutable. That argument doesn't work for me, either, based on what I've read about being homosexual and based on my own experiences with my lesbian and gay friends. The whole "where do you draw the line" argument--that allowing gay marriage will lead inexorably to allowing, say, person-canine marriage (yep, I've heard that one) ignores the fact that states limit man-woman marriages on line-drawing reasons all the time. For example, there are limits on marrying under-age opposite-sex people.

My hope is that, in a few short years, this debate will go the way of the debate on inter-racial marriage. In the meantime, though, a whole lot of people whom I love are going through some serious hurt as they listen to some of the rhetoric being lobbed their way. Their hurt is my hurt, too.

Full post as published by Nancy Rapoport's Blogspot on November 11, 2008 (boomark / email).