Liberty, Justice & Marriage Equality

       

        California’s same-sex marriage ban, known as Proposition 8, was recently ruled unconstitutional by a federal appeals court, declaring it serves no purpose other than to “lessen the status and human dignity” of gays.  The ban on gay marriage was originally approved by voters in 2008 with 52% of the vote, however, it was since declared unconstitutional because it singled out a minority group for unnecessary, unequal treatment. 

     The three-judge panel of California’s 9^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals concluded the law had no purpose other than to deny gay couples marriage.  The state of California already grants couples all the rights and benefits of marriage if they register as domestic partners. The single dissenting judge insisted the ban could help ensure that children are raised by married, opposite-sex parents. 

      While reading this piece of news, I was reminded of a statement Rick Santorum recently made vis-à-vis this same topic. Santorum suggested ‘it was so important for children to have both a father and mother that an imprisoned father was preferable to a same-sex parent….that even fathers in jail who had abandoned their kids were still better than no father at all to have in their children’s lives…’  This, alongside other misogynous statements he has made lately involving women in the military and birth control, is appallingly outrageous and offensive.

      These sort of speeches make me wonder if people who are that homophobic aren’t just gay themselves [as this has played out publicly apropos other politicians] but not admitting to it, or have so much self-loathing because of it that they have to make everyone else as miserable as they are.  I don’t understand the mind-set of people who have to dictate to others what they can or cannot do concerning their sexual preferences and choices.  They want the entire society to portray the role of heteronormativity; anything else simply isn’t acceptable.