To The Editors:
I just finished reading Torivio Fodder and Bruce Gago's "In Defense of Marriage" (The Dartmouth, March 1), and I feel compelled to speak out against its hypocrisy. It's distressing enough that the two feel that they have the right to assault The Dartmouth Editorial Board for being "strangely intolerant," while issuing their own sweeping condemnation of gay marriage as an "artificial and damaging aberration." But what I find more disturbing is that while they defend marriage as a "culmination of love, a sacred bond and a perpetual union," they fail to recognize the full meaning and gravity of their own words.
Though they claim to understand that marriage is an institution of true and abiding love, throughout their argument they cite the defining characteristic of marriage as one of gender. Millennia of human experience and world cultures, they claim, have "defined marriage as the union of a man and a woman." And yet it would seem that if the hallmark of marriage is love, it is a bond which can transcend simple issues of gender to unite the spirit and the soul.
If marriage is indeed a union of love, any attempt to deny two people the right to marry -- whether man and woman, woman and woman or man and man -- implicitly condemns their feelings as insufficient for marriage. To say gay men and women cannot marry is to say that they cannot love. No government -- no human being, for that matter -- has the right to refute the legitimate and abiding love which should be marriage's only limitation.
Fodder and Gago would do well to remember when they cite ages of human experience as evidence of the nature of marriage that for much of this time in most of these cultures, marriages were arranged for political or financial expediency. Perhaps the fact that there are so few betrothals in America today indicates that our own culture has popularly accepted marriage as a union of mutual love -- one that is entered in freely and willingly. If this is indeed the case, surely the choice to marry whomever one loves is the right of every citizen.
