Gay Marriage And Steve Argument

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Tommy Tucker Prof Baird Eng. 112 2/26/13 Adam and Steve? I grew up force-fed religion. Church three times a week, I even attended a private Christian elementary school. I was taught God did not hate the sinner but he hates the sin, and homosexuality was presented to me as a sin. I was indoctrinated from a very early age that it was a choice to be gay and if you made that choice you were immoral, and would possibly end up in hell. “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve”, my mentors would joke. It was a sin in my young eyes just to be gay so obviously gay marriage was out of the question. As most kids who have had religion shoved down their throat I didn’t begin to truly question this belief that homosexuality was wrong…show more content…
Not allowing people to marry has always in my eyes been a form of discrimination and a violation of civil rights. Gay marriage is a natural progression of the civil rights movement of the sixties. In an article by Dahlia lithwick and Sonja West the authors point to a correlation between the two. The article talks about the land mark case Loving V Virginia. In this case a white man and a black woman were married in Washington D.C., and then returned to their home in Virginia. The couple is charged with violating Virginias ban on interracial marriage. They were found guilty and sentenced to one year in jail. The judge however said he would suspend the sentence if the couple left Virginia for twenty five years. Richard and Mildred Loving then took their case all the way to the Supreme Court where the nation’s highest court ruled in favor of the Lovings. The justices ruled that the “right to marry is of fundamental importance for all individuals” and “one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness”, marriage was found by the court to be a “fundamental freedom” protected by the constitution. The basis for the ruling was the 14th amendment of the constitution section one…show more content…
In a recent poll taken “Of 4,013 adults…shows that 49 percent say that homosexuality is morally wrong, 9 percent morally acceptable and 35 percent say it is not a moral issue. That’s little changed from a February 2006 Pew poll, when 50 percent said it was morally wrong, 12 percent morally acceptable and 33 percent said it was not a moral issue.” (Cherry)That’s almost half of those polled, feel it comes down to being morally unacceptable to allow gay marriage. I would argue in response that this is not a moral issue, but just to show how absurd the argument is I will take it on. Rapists, murderers, and even child molesters are legally allowed to marry. So if you are saying that gay marriage should not be allowed to marry based on moral issues, you are in essence saying that morally it is worse to be a homosexual than to be a rapist, murderer, or child molester. It is this kind of thinking that has held society back. Still others would argue that due to divorce and cohabitation the institution of marriage is already in a weakened state. They view allowing legal gay marriage as the potential straw that is going to break marriages back. I would acknowledge marriage does not have the same prevalence and level of commitment it held in past generations but the decline of marriage has nothing to do with homosexuals.
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