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Sunday, August 14, 2005

Special Rights, Not Equal Rights

In this post, I linked to Alfonso Trujillo’s argument that gay marriage isn’t about equal rights, but instead about special rights. Alfonso said this:

Currently everybody already has the same rights with regard to marriage. You, homosexuals, heterosexuals, and me are all legally allowed to marry any person of the opposite sex of our choice who is distant from us in terms of kinship and who is not already married. Homosexuals have that very same right. […]

“But gays are not allowed to marry the person they love”, you say. But that is the case with everybody. If I, as a male citizen of the United States fell in love with my sister, I would not be allowed to marry her. If I, as a male citizen of the United States fell in love with multiple women, I would be restricted to only marrying one.

Professor Samwick responded at Vox Baby:

I do not believe this is a constitutional issue. But neither is it more than a semantic point that can be refuted simply by noting that homosexuals would not object to two heterosexual men marrying each other, either. They want these special rights for everyone.

And if you are a heterosexual man and think that prospect doesn’t do much for your liberty as a citizen, then you now have some understanding of why this argument against gay marriage is so hollow.

That is a fair point, but it fails to address Alfonso’s more potent argument (and the one he unfortunately seemed to stress less), which is that a man and woman close to one another in kinship cannot marry. To me, this is concrete, globally-accepted, and long-standing proof that we limit the definition of marriage at the expense of the happiness of an (admittedly small, but so is the homosexual set as a percentage) group of people. In this case, over a period of centuries we came to the conclusion that those who happen to fall in love with a relative ought not marry.

A brother and sister could theoretically have a long and joyous married life. Yet we forbid them to wed, and deny them that chance at happiness. Why? Forget religion; forget constitutionality. It is a decision that society has made in order to enforce a certain social order. In fact, we limit marriage to non-kin largely because of procreative and health issues, which is the chief reason many oppose gay marriage.

Posted on August 14, 2005 01:46 AM. Permalink