The politics of marriage

As far as politics go, I happen to be the poster child for liberalism. (I know this because I took a five-question Facebook quiz, and the arrow pointed all the way to the left.) And one of the issues that I am most passionately a proponent for is gay marriage. I am shocked that the rest of the country (save Massachusetts) hasn’t caught up with what seems so obvious to me.\nFirst off, the opposition to gay marriage exemplifies the problem our country has with separating church and state. When kids are forced to recite the Pledge of Allegiance to God, when “In God we trust” is written on our money and when people aren’t allowed to marry because it isn’t religiously sound, you have to admit that America doesn’t follow this whole separation idea. If you believe gay marriage is wrong for religious reasons, than let it be up to the individual places of worship to decide whether or not they choose to perform gay marriages, not the federal government. \nAnd if you are an American, you can’t argue that marriage is some holy institution needing to be upheld and protected in our society. I think Chris Rock expressed it best when he said, “Marriage ain’t sacred! Not in America! Not in the country that watches ‘Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire?’ or ‘The Bachelor’ or ‘The Bachelorette’ or ‘Who Wants to Marry a Midget?’ ... Gay people have as much of a right to be miserable as everybody else!” And that’s not even mentioning the divorce rate in America.\nPeople also argue that being gay isn’t natural. And if they adopt, their kids won’t be “normal” raised in that kind of environment, or worse (gasp!) they’ll “turn their kids gay,” etc. Well, in terms of being natural, if you’ve ever nuked your food in a microwave or eaten at McDonald’s ... you’ve committed an unnatural act. A man and a woman being “natural” because of the biological aspect of childbirth is a common argument, but with overpopulation it seems kind of counterproductive to argue this and impede on someone’s happiness in the process. And the same way that heterosexual couples have gay children, gay parents can have heterosexual children, so I really don’t think that argument holds any weight.\nIgnoring all the nitty-gritty politics that we’re all aware of and how complicated the issue is, the bottom line is that if someone wants to love someone and start a family with him or her, we should be celebrating that. How does a couple falling in love and wanting to get married affect anyone else, especially the government? We’re not talking about a random few cases here. The GLBT community is a large, vocal and active minority that cannot be ignored. Being afraid that society will ostracize the children of these couples is no reason to ban gay marriage. In fact, the only logical way to avoid harassment for gays and gay families is to familiarize people with a lifestyle that may not be the same as their own. We’ve heard it all a million times: Ignorance is what leads to discrimination. \nAnd gays are discriminated against daily across our country. Just walk by any group of students at any time of the day, and you’ll hear offensive name-calling that’s been normalized in everyday conversation. I’m not sure how long it will take, but I’m confident that at some point gay marriage will be allowed everywhere in the U.S. And I think that when it happens, we’ll all look back on it the way we look back on the civil rights issues for women and minority races, and we won’t be proud of our history or how long it took us to get there.