As Expected Deseret News Opposes Walker’s Ruling on Same Sex Marriage
A bad same-sex ruling
Deseret News
Published: Tuesday, Aug. 10, 2010 12:15 a.m. MDT
Proponents of gay marriage have managed to frame the issue as one of equal treatment under the law, often asking opponents to demonstrate how the marriage of two men or two women could cause harm to anyone else’s heterosexual marriage.
This is an entirely wrong and misleading framework and question. The more relevant question ought to be why governments have an interest in sanctioning marriages at all.
This editorial, The Deseret News, and the LDS Church are willfully skirting the issues that faced the court in a continuing attempt to rationalize their opposition to same-sex marriage.
Repeat the same old saw enough times, and offer enough smokescreens, and it’s amazing how many brain waves can be shut down.
The issue is a constitutional issue of equal protection under the law. The courts have continually told opponents of same-sex marriage that it is unconstitutional to deny homosexuals equal protection under the law. In America we don’t hold elections to determine our right to equal protection. In order to deny equal protection to anyone we would have to change the constitution. Proposition 8 was a blatant unconstitutional effort to deny equal protection of the laws to gays and lesbians. The courts have ruled on this subject time and again and still the opponents haven’t gotten the message. It is not just Justice Vaughn Walker. It began in 1993 when the Hawaii Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional to deny equal protection under the law to gays and lesbians. Judges are bound by the law to uphold equal protection of the laws. Judges have never had a compelling reason to deny equal protection of the law to gays and lesbians. Bigotry simply isn’t a compelling reason and it is the basis of all the arguments offered in opposition to same-sex marriage. Opponents just can’t muster up any other defense and while bigotry can cut it at the ballot box, it can’t cut it in the courts.
The answer to that one is clear. Because of their concern for the general welfare, governments have a compelling interest in sanctioning behaviors designed to perpetuate order and progress. With that in mind, they have an interest in sanctioning the only kind of sexual relations best designed to lead to healthy children being raised in a way that gives them the greatest chance for success as adults. That is through the marriage of one man and one woman.
The fact that some married people can’t have children is irrelevant. The fact that many marriages break up or that some children of marriages are abused does not change the argument. People are inherently flawed. There also are extraordinary citizens who were raised in single-parent or nontraditional homes. But the man-woman marriage template remains the best chance for children and the only type of relationship the state ought to have an interest in sanctioning. Governments typically don’t sanction every man-woman union, either. First cousins, for example, often are forbidden to marry, again because of the possible effects on children such a union might produce.
Most Americans, it seems, understand all this. Certainly, most Californians did when they passed Proposition 8. So did voters in 30 other states, most recently Maine. Same-sex marriage has lost every time it has been put to a vote in this country. Even state legislatures in some typically liberal states, such as New York, have defeated the idea.
But now Judge Vaughn Walker of the U.S. District Court in San Francisco has overturned that vote. He not only bought into the popular, but false, framework for marriage as a civil right absent any thought to history, nature or centuries of both secular and religious tradition — he declared that “gender no longer forms an essential part of marriage.” To get there, he used tortured legal reasoning that cited the gradual move toward equality of the sexes as a basis for determining that there is no difference between the sexes.
Along the way, he managed to cast those in favor of Proposition 8, including the majority of California voters, as irrational people who base their feelings on moral and religious views, which he sweeps aside as an immaterial basis for a law.
To the contrary, the benefits of heterosexual marriage are rational and time-tested. The effects of gay marriage are unknown. Governments have no interest in sanctioning or solemnizing the love people may have for one another. They do, however, have a great interest in sanctioning a time-tested institution that is best for the raising of children.
That does not mean gay people should be denied equal rights. Indeed, they deserve equal rights in everything from housing to employment, probate and medical care. Marriage, however, should remain within its traditional bounds.
Judge Walker’s decision was wrong. The Constitution is silent on the subject of marriage, and the civil rights argument is irrational. Marriage is a state issue, and Californians have settled it at the ballot box. We hope the judges who hear this case on appeal can see this and overturn the ruling.