Amidst the confluence of corporate corruption, government intrusion, constitutional neglect, rising unemployment and oscillating stock indexes, the New Hampshire legislature has decided to focus on a comparatively immaterial policy matter: repealing the legalization of same-sex marriage.
Last October, amid the considerable civic turmoil whipping through our world, the New Hampshire legislature began the process of repealing the legalization of same-sex marriage, initially signed into law by Governor John Lynch two years prior in June 2009. New Hampshire was the fifth state in the nation to legalize same-sex marriage, and nearly 2,000 same-sex couples have since been married under the law. The New Hampshire House of Representatives is expected to vote on the repeal measure today, followed shortly thereafter by a vote in the Senate.
The bill is predicted to pass both the House and Senate before facing a veto by Lynch. It remains uncertain whether the House and Senate have the votes to subsequently override the veto. If they do, the bill's passage would represent a travesty of popular sovereignty. A recent University of New Hampshire poll demonstrated that nearly two-thirds of the state's voting-eligible population opposes the repeal of same-sex marriage. A second poll of only Republican primary voters showed just 60 percent support for the repeal roughly one-fifth of the state's voting population.
The vague and massively flawed reasoning in the bill's text provides no further insight into the basis for repeal. The bill describes marriage as a long-established social institution that predates the existence of, and therefore remains invincible to, our system of laws. It's too bad that the issue at hand is solely a matter of law. Regardless of historical status, marriage as defined and delivered by the state is a purely secular, statutorily-based institution with ramifications extending all throughout codified law, from property rights to insurance and tax benefits, from government assistance programs to immigration issues.
The bill's description of marriage rests heavily on the modern Judeo-Christian understanding of marriage as a formal union between one man and one woman. This understanding ignores crucial components of marriage's history. Conceptions of marriage have changed throughout time and among cultures, some of which, indeed, honored same-sex unions. Marriage often served as little more than a means of combining families' personal assets, and the role of both the church and state in sanctioning marriage has been consistent only in its variability. Marriage, as classically understood and presently defined, is but a product of our modern society.
The bill claims that marriage between a man and woman "serves and supports important social goods in which the government ... has a compelling interest," implying that no such interests or goods are relevant to marriages between two members of the same sex, or that these social goods are unattainable by same-sex marriages. Yet study after study has demonstrated that same-sex marriages contribute to society in exactly the same ways as so-called traditional marriage: by encouraging the establishment of family units that procure security, stability and economic prosperity for both the individual family unit and society as a whole.
The bill concludes on a particularly insidious note, claiming that children are best served when raised by their biological mother and father, bound by the union of marriage. Were this baseless platitude even true, it remains unclear how same-sex marriage would dissuade biological parents from raising their own children. But the assumption here is even more sinister. As many as one in three same-sex couples in New Hampshire may be raising children. For the state legislature to suggest that these couples, as parents, serve at best as an inferior proxy pair is not only patently untrue multiple studies have demonstrated that children raised by same-sex couples are at least as well-adjusted as those raised by their biological parents it's a barbaric reproach on thousands of adults striving to provide a loving environment for their children.
The state of New Hampshire could not be more misguided in attempting to repeal the legalization of same-sex marriage. Within the pervasive volatility that encumbers our present reality, injecting this sort of uncertainty and instability into the lives of same-sex families across the state is especially cruel. The repeal lacks compelling justification and is simply the wrong thing to do.
