Dear ol' California. In case the news hasn't penetrated your corner of the Bubble, California recently became the second state to uphold gay marriage in the courts, and with a Republican-appointed majority no less. Now with our ancient institution again "under attack" from those crazy and kooky Democrats, perhaps it's a good time to ask: "What is marriage?"
We've all been exposed to the "marriage is between a man and a woman" argument, and it should certainly be stated that the Defense of Marriage Act makes this interpretation federal law. However, the basis behind these arguments is patently absurd. There is also another de facto state of affairs within our government -- the separation of church and state. This is not explicitly defined in the Constitution and has come under scrutiny by the Supreme Court in the past, but nevertheless I don't believe it to be an extreme assertion that this separation is prevalent in our political environment.
This separation is what makes the DOMA definition unacceptable. Too often these valiant defenders of marriage liberally pepper their arguments with Bible quotes, which usually appear as the foundation for their entire argument. This would be fine, I suppose, if we lived in a country like the Holy See, but in the United States, and other presumably secular states, this cannot be acceptable.
What these religion-based arguments do serve to highlight, however, is an oft-ignored distinction between two kinds of marriage. What we have to force ourselves to consider is "Marriage" and "marriage." "Marriage," as I would like to define it here, is a religious ceremony. I hesitate to define it any further since every religion that I know of has its own individual take on how this ceremony is to be executed and what privileges and responsibilities it entails. Catholics may find that the pope decrees that Marriage is between a man and a woman, and thus it is so. Unitarian-Universalists, on the other hand, cannot even be said to have any common view on the matter.
But "marriage" is different. It is defined by a country, and so may be said to have a constant definition within a nation's political boundaries. Some states may choose to define marriage such that it is the same as Marriage as defined by a certain religion, yet others may choose a different interpretation. Other nations may have no regularly defined marriage ceremony, just as the Unitarian-Universalists. In fact, why don't we play a game of mad libs? You think of a verb and a noun and fill in the following sentence: "marriage" is a ceremony in which a [noun] is [verb]ed.
It doesn't even have to be a ceremony! It could be an instantaneous psychic transmission that is immediately forgotten as long as a state defines it as such.
Here, the separation of church and state means that we can define our own "marriage," but in the spirit of protecting the minorities we must not allow it to intentionally exclude any group based on its sexual orientation (and age, race, gender, etc). Otherwise, we find that our fellow Americans are subject to discrimination, which flies in the face of what I believe to be our national character.
"Civil unions" are equally unacceptable. While they are a step in the right direction for not being bound by a particular religion's definition of Marriage, they still discriminate against homosexuals. Remember the separate but equal clause? Its intention was to provide the same federal services to everyone in separate locations. I don't think that we really need to walk that road again.
As it is presently defined by the federal government under the DOMA, "marriage" is not only based upon the Christian definition of Marriage to a disturbing degree, but is also explicitly discriminatory against a particular group of Americans. The present definition of marriage drives our nation dangerously close to a tyranny of the majority, and I applaud the California decision for having the prescience to understand that.
