Gay Marriage

Gay marriage.

What do you think?

Personally, I find it very hard to get worked up about.

Unfortunately, I think I am one of the few people on the planet that doesn’t think it’s the beginnings of the complete and total decay of morals and western society.

Here’s why I don’t understand:

There are x number of gay people in the world today. If gay marriage is made universally legal tomorrow, there will still be x number of gay people in the world. What do these nay-sayers expect? That suddenly being gay will become fashionable? That the world will suddenly be flooded with gays, being heterosexual will become a ‘minority’?

Also, I completely fail to see what being gay has to do with morality. Let’s define gay as “Liking members of the same sex.” What exactly is wrong with that?

Well, they have sex! Oh my God! They can’t reproduce, but they have sex anyway! That’s immoral!

Hate to be the one to point this out, but why do people buy condoms? So they can have sex without reproducing. If that’s what makes being gay wrong, who can honestly say they’ve never had sex purely for enjoyment?

Basically, if you have two children and have had sex more than twice, you’re just as guilty of ‘immorality’ as gay people are.

Sex is also a means of expressing your love for someone.

That’s the thing people leave out of the gay ‘equation’. Love. To a lot of people gay is immoral hedonism.

Well, just like above, heterosexuals are just as guilty of ‘immoral hedonism’. Go to a night club, I doubt that most of the people there are looking for a long-term, meaningful relationship.

The other big sticking point is ‘gay adoption’. It’s wrong, it’s immoral. Two men or two women shouldn’t be allowed to raise a child!

To a point, I agree. All children should have the perfect nuclear family. A mother, a father and a couple of brothers and sisters.

However, in the real world, that isn’t always possible.

Over 50% of marriages fail. That’s a fact. This means that around half of all children alive today don’t have the ‘prefect nuclear family’. They’re raised by a single parent.

Should the children be removed from these relationships? When we get married, should we be forced to sign an completely unbreakable contract that says you have to stay together forever? If a couple get divorces, and the wife goes to live with her mother…should the children be taken into care, because he or she is being raised by a mother and grandmother, instead of a mother and father?

If this was the case, there would be outage that this would be a breach of our human rights…so why are we so hell bent on denying others these rights?

If we look at marriage, it consists of two main features. The first is the legal right to stand up in front of your friends and family, and claim another person as your partner. A formal declaration of your love for another person.

Now, this is important, but I don’t think it’s the most important thing to gay people in fighting for gay marriage.

The second is the legal side. When you marry someone, you give each other certain rights. For example, when I married Sunny she became my next of kin. This means that if I’m ever really sick, she is the one who is consulted about my treatment. If I die, she inherits everything I own.

This is the thing that we take for granted, that gay people are denied. How would you feel if you’d spent 50 years with someone, and then you suddenly find you have absolutely no rights or say in what happens to them if they get sick?

It all comes back to simple homophobia. We fear what we don’t understand.

I’m going to end today with a true story of something that happened to me.

When I was in school, I was as homophobic as they come. I had the typical pre-teen attitude. Being gay was wrong, AIDS was a homosexual disease. You name the stereotype, and I believed it.

Then, when I got into college, one of my best friends came out as gay.

That made me think. I’d been friends with this guy for over ten years. Was I willing to end a decade-long friendship, just because I found out my best friend liked men instead of women.

The answer is, no I wasn’t. He was the same person on the day he came out as the day I met him. What he chose to do in the privacy of his own home was up to him.

You see, when someone you know turns out to be gay, you realize just how stupid the homophobic arguments are. You can’t ‘catch’ gay, and assuming that every single gay man will try to have sex with you is as stupid as assuming that every single woman on the planet is just dying to jump into bed with you.

Basically, this whole issue is ridiculous, and has gathered far more homophobic outrage and hype than it deserves.

The truth is, if gay marriage was made universally legal tomorrow, the straight community would hardly notice. The only thing that would change would be a name. Simply change the word ‘couple’ for ‘marriage’. Wow, what a world-shattering change!

You see, I hate to burst any bubbles, but there aren’t millions of straight people just champing at the bit, waiting for gay marriage to be legalized, so they can rush out and find a same-sex partner.

No, what we have is a number of gay couples who already live together as ‘man and wife’, who simply want to have the same legal protection and rights that the straight community already takes for granted.