Gay marriage "rights"

Thomas Sowell



In all the states where gay marriage was on the ballot last year, the
voters voted against it -- as they should have.

Of all the phony arguments for gay marriage, the phoniest is the
argument that it is a matter of equal rights.

Marriage is not a right
extended to individuals by the government.

Gay marriage "rights"

Thomas Sowell

In all the states where gay marriage was on the ballot last year, the
voters voted against it -- as they should have.

Of all the phony arguments for gay marriage, the phoniest is the
argument that it is a matter of equal rights. Marriage is not a right
extended to individuals by the government. It is a restriction on the
rights they already have.

People who are simply living together can make whatever arrangements
they want, whether they are heterosexual or homosexual. They can divide
up their worldly belongings 50-50 or 90-10 or whatever other way they
want. They can make their union temporary or permanent or subject to
cancellation at any time.

Marriage is a restriction. If my wife buys an automobile with her own
money, under California marriage laws I automatically own half of it,
whether or not my name is on the title. Whether that law is good, bad,
or indifferent, it is a limitation of our freedom to arrange such
things as we ourselves might choose. This is just one of many decisions
that marriage laws take out of our hands.

Oliver Wendell Holmes said that the life of the law is not logic but
experience. Marriage laws have evolved through centuries of experience
with couples of opposite sexes -- and the children that result from
such unions. Society asserts its stake in the decisions made by
restricting the couples' options.

Society has no such stake in the outcome of a union between two people
of the same sex. Transferring all those laws to same-sex couples would
make no more sense than transferring the rules of baseball to football.

Why then do gay activists want their options restricted by marriage
laws, when they can make their own contracts with their own provisions
and hold whatever kinds of ceremony they want to celebrate it?

The issue is not individual rights. What the activists are seeking is
official social approval of their lifestyle. But this is the antithesis
of equal rights.

If you have a right to someone else's approval, then they do not have
a right to their own opinions and values. You cannot say that what
"consenting adults" do in private is nobody else's business and then
turn around and say that others are bound to put their seal of approval
on it.

The rhetoric of "equal rights" has become the road to special
privilege for all sorts of groups, so perhaps it was inevitable that
gay activists would take that road as well. It has worked. They have
already succeeded in getting far more government money for AIDS than
for other diseases that kill far more people.

The time is long overdue to stop word games about equal rights from
leading to special privileges -- for anybody -- and gay marriage is as
good an issue on which to do so as anything else.

Incidentally, it is not even clear how many homosexuals actually want
marriage, even though gay activists are pushing it.

What the activists really want is the stamp of acceptance on
homosexuality, as a means of spreading that lifestyle, which has become
a death style in the era of AIDS.

They have already succeeded to a remarkable degree in our public
schools, where so-called "AIDS education" or other pious titles are put
on programs that promote homosexuality. In some cases, gay activists
actually come to the schools, not only to promote homosexuality as an
idea but even to pass out the addresses of local gay hangouts to the
kids.

There is no limit to what people will do if you let them get away with
it. That our schools, which are painfully failing to educate our
children to the standards in other countries, have time for promoting
homosexuality is truly staggering.

Every special interest group has an incentive to take something away
from society as a whole. Some will be content just to siphon off a
share of the taxpayers' money for themselves. Others, however, want to
dismantle a part of the structure of values that make a society viable.

They may not want to bring down the whole structure, just get rid of
the part that cramps their style. But when innumerable groups start
dismantling pieces of the structure that they don't like, we can be
headed for the kinds of social collapses seen both in history and in
other parts of the world in our own times.

Gay marriage "rights"
Thomas Sowell

Of all the phony arguments for gay marriage, the phoniest is the
argument that it is a matter of equal rights. Marriage is not a right
extended to individuals by the government. It is a restriction on the
rights they already have.

People who are simply living together can make whatever arrangements
they want, whether they are heterosexual or homosexual. They can divide
up their worldly belongings 50-50 or 90-10 or whatever other way they
want. They can make their union temporary or permanent or subject to
cancellation at any time.

Marriage is a restriction. If my wife buys an automobile with her own
money, under California marriage laws I automatically own half of it,
whether or not my name is on the title. Whether that law is good, bad,
or indifferent, it is a limitation of our freedom to arrange such
things as we ourselves might choose. This is just one of many decisions
that marriage laws take out of our hands.

Oliver Wendell Holmes said that the life of the law is not logic but
experience. Marriage laws have evolved through centuries of experience
with couples of opposite sexes -- and the children that result from
such unions. Society asserts its stake in the decisions made by
restricting the couples' options.

Why then do gay activists want their options restricted by marriage
laws, when they can make their own contracts with their own provisions
and hold whatever kinds of ceremony they want to celebrate it?

The issue is not individual rights. What the activists are seeking is
official social approval of their lifestyle. But this is the antithesis
of equal rights.

If you have a right to someone else's approval, then they do not have
a right to their own opinions and values. You cannot say that what
"consenting adults" do in private is nobody else's business and then
turn around and say that others are bound to put their seal of approval
on it.

The rhetoric of "equal rights" has become the road to special
privilege for all sorts of groups, so perhaps it was inevitable that
gay activists would take that road as well. It has worked. They have
already succeeded in getting far more government money for AIDS than
for other diseases that kill far more people.

The time is long overdue to stop word games about equal rights from
leading to special privileges -- for anybody -- and gay marriage is as
good an issue on which to do so as anything else.

Incidentally, it is not even clear how many homosexuals actually want
marriage, even though gay activists are pushing it.

What the activists really want is the stamp of acceptance on
homosexuality, as a means of spreading that lifestyle, which has become
a death style in the era of AIDS.

They have already succeeded to a remarkable degree in our public
schools, where so-called "AIDS education" or other pious titles are put
on programs that promote homosexuality. In some cases, gay activists
actually come to the schools, not only to promote homosexuality as an
idea but even to pass out the addresses of local gay hangouts to the
kids.

There is no limit to what people will do if you let them get away with
it. That our schools, which are painfully failing to educate our
children to the standards in other countries, have time for promoting
homosexuality is truly staggering.

They may not want to bring down the whole structure, just get rid of
the part that cramps their style. But when innumerable groups start
dismantling pieces of the structure that they don't like, we can be
headed for the kinds of social collapses seen both in history and in
other parts of the world in our own times.

Gay marriage "rights"

Thomas Sowell



In all the states where gay marriage was on the ballot last year, the
voters voted against it -- as they should have.