12-21-2005, 04:50 PM
There are two types of marriage: spiritual and civil. The spiritual union is the ceremony everybody has come to equate with marriage. Indeed, if you are religious, it's the one that matters, but it does no more than unify people in the eyes of that religious group; no rights are granted. Same-sex marriage, where legal, is a civil union, meaning that the couple is entitled to all the legal rights afforded those in wedlock. All it requires is filling out paperwork, so it's hard to imagine why people get upset about it.
As for homosexuals having rights, you have to consider them human in order for them to deserve human rights. Anybody who sees them as less than that will have no problem denying them all kinds of things. In fact, most of the inhumanity in history has been justified this way, especially genocides. Even the military--and yes, everybody's military--dehumanizes the enemy so they can be killed without crisis of conscience (and people wonder why an invasion force is so bad at peacekeeping).
Same-sex marriage has been legal in at least one European country for over ten years, and they haven't experienced any of the symptoms described by the opposition.
As for homosexuals having rights, you have to consider them human in order for them to deserve human rights. Anybody who sees them as less than that will have no problem denying them all kinds of things. In fact, most of the inhumanity in history has been justified this way, especially genocides. Even the military--and yes, everybody's military--dehumanizes the enemy so they can be killed without crisis of conscience (and people wonder why an invasion force is so bad at peacekeeping).
Same-sex marriage has been legal in at least one European country for over ten years, and they haven't experienced any of the symptoms described by the opposition.