The Free Press, Mankato, MN

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March 12, 2010

Your View: Tradition is no excuse for discrimination

Fred Slocum, Mankato





Peter Etzell’s apoplexy over gay marriage, published March 2 in The Free Press, is baffling.

Bowers v. Hardwick (1986) isn’t the last word on sexual privacy for GLBT persons. In Lawrence v. Texas (2003), the Supreme Court overturned Bowers, ruling that gays and lesbians deserve respect for their private lives. Two Texas men, arrested for sodomy in their own apartment, faced (in four other states) mandatory registration by authorities as convicted sex offenders — the same treatment given to convicted rapists and child molesters, according to supreme.lp.findlaw.com. If that isn’t unjust, I don’t know what is.

If sexual activity is private and involves only consenting adults, it’s neither Etzell’s nor any government’s business.

There are conservative and liberal arguments favoring gay marriage. The liberal argument is the nondiscrimination principle: Banning same-sex marriage while allowing it for otherwise-equivalent opposite-sex couples is unequivocally discrimination. The conservative argument is that society should encourage long-term, committed relationships, for all — no exceptions. According to an article in Newsweek, conservative lawyer Theodore Olson articulates the conservative case, recognizing marriage as “a stable bond” between individuals pursuing “a loving household and a social and economic partnership” that promotes societal well-being and is “part of the Constitution’s protections of liberty, privacy, freedom of association and spiritual identification.”

Depriving this institution based on sexual orientation, Olson notes, has no rational basis. Olson deftly disposes of several arguments raised by gay-marriage opponents: Promoting procreation, preventing vague “harm” to heterosexual marriage, and finally “tradition,” which once justified debtor’s prisons, segregated schools and laws banning interracial marriage.

Tradition is no excuse for discrimination. In marriage and other arenas, the right of gays and lesbians to be free from discrimination must override the Religious Right’s “right” to impose discrimination.

 

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