Marriage is Gay

Headline: Supreme Court to hear gay marriage cases

When I visited The Netherlands to attend my niece's wedding I discovered that the official marriage ceremony was the one conducted at the Mayor' office. That was also where the pictures of the ceremony and attendants were taken. Later we went to the church where the religious ceremony was performed.

I immediately liked this arrangement for a couple of reasons. First, marriage has legal consequences such as taxes and custody of children. That is the basic point of one of the two suits being brought before the Supreme Court. Legal marriage should treat the couple as citizens. Yet the Defense of Marriage Act treats gay citizens as second class and denies them rights that other citizens have. That is what we used to do with women and African-Americans but I thought we had gotten beyond such unfair nonsense.

The second reason I like the Dutch arrangement is that it makes the church marriage optional. If you believe in marriage as an act of faith you are welcome to celebrate the wedding as you wish. If you don't believe, as is increasingly common in this age of reason, the ceremony in the Mayor's office is enough. And that is the underlying issue in the other case being considered by the Supreme Court, the legality of California's Proposition 8. That law tries to make marriage exclusively a religious act. Religions that view marriage as a matter of faith get to "protect" their faith by banning gay marriage. I'm sorry, you don't get to do that in a democracy. And the Supreme Court had better recognize that fact.