The so-called “debate” on marriage equality is misguided because there is absolutely nothing preventing same-sex couples from marrying at this very moment. In states where same-sex marriage is recognized by the government, same-sex couples can marry. In states where same-sex marriage is not recognized by the government, same-sex couples can still marry. This is because marriage is in no way contingent on government approval.
To use an analogy, consider the Christian sacrament of confirmation. Christians are confirmed all the time, and there is no multimillion-dollar governmental bureaucracy that mails certificates to confirmed Christians, and there is no multimillion-dollar governmental bureaucracy that provides special benefits to confirmed Christians. This is because confirmation is recognized by the Church, not by the government. Whether the government recognizes a person’s confirmation has no bearing on whether a person is confirmed in the eyes of the Church.
Similarly, the government plays no role in keeping track of Jews who celebrate their bar mitzvah or bat mitzvah. This is because, again, the government’s recognition (or lack thereof) of a Jewish ceremony has no bearing on the religious recognition of the ceremony.
However, for some reason, people continue to believe that the government plays a role in the recognition of marriage, which is also a religious institution. But in the same way that the government cannot legitimately initiate a confirmation for a Christian or initiate a bar mitzvah or bat mitzvah for a Jew, the government is unable to legitimately sanctify a marriage. The government is not a religious institution, so it cannot grant legitimacy to a religious ceremony. And even if the government does not “recognize” a marriage in the legal sense, that lack of recognition does not undermine a religious institution’s legitimate recognition of a marriage.
Currently, the government not only claims to “recognize” marriages, but it also grants special privileges to married couples. These benefits are unfair. The government grants special hospital-visitation privileges to married couples, but these privileges are arbitrary because anyone who cares about a patient should be able to visit him or her in the hospital, whether the visitor is a spouse, a fiancee, a boyfriend, a girlfriend or an uncle. The government also grants financial privileges to married couples for the nominal sake of encouraging “families,” but this is also arbitrary because unmarried couples with children are families to the same extent as married couples with children are families. In fact, families with children born out of wedlock might even need more assistance than families with children born to married parents.
The entire “debate” on gay marriage is groundless. There is no point debating whether the government should recognize marriages when it is not even in a legitimate position to recognize marriages in the first place.
Leon Li is a senior psychology major. He can be reached at lli@umd.edu.
