GAYS DEFEND MARRIAGE

In honor of the June weddings taking place all over California today because of the Supreme Court’s decision in In Re Marriage Cases (the lamest name for a court case I’ve ever heard of, by the way), I have a piece in today’s Los Angeles Daily News responding to the frequent claim that gay marriage won’t hurt straight marriage. Regular readers of the site will recognize some of the arguments, which I first explored here.

Update: A longer version of the “harm” piece is now up at the Web site of the Sun-Sentinel, the second largest newspaper in South Florida. Florida is likely to be the #2 marriage battleground this fall. GDM reader Mark Barton may or may not be pleased to see I mentioned him (not by name) in that version of the piece.

Excerpted from the piece:

DEFENDERS of the same-sex marriages set to start today in California have repeatedly claimed that the new definition of marriage will in no way hurt male-female marriages. Even the state Supreme Court decision paving the way for these June weddings declared its move would not deprive any male-female couple “of any of the rights and benefits conferred by the marriage statutes.”

But marriage is not just about rights and benefits. It is a social institution that existed long before the state of California. Extending the word “marriage” to couples that have never before been considered married will cause real and appreciable harm to male-female marriages, and to all people who believe that marriage is the union of a man and a woman….

If people think that, on the whole, detaching monogamy from marriage and making it harder for parents to control their children’s education about homosexuality are not nearly as big of a problem as the self-esteem of same-sex couples who are told that their relationships with completely equal benefits are only domestic partnerships and not marriages, fine. Don’t support November’s California Marriage Protection Act.

But please stop saying same-sex marriage doesn’t hurt anybody.