When I was a kid, our church took up a collection to pay for the marriage of a young woman from Sierra Leone. She had lived faithfully with a man for many years, they had a child together, and they had always wanted to get married. But the government of that country used marriage as a tool to control its people, and the price of a marriage license -- worth several months' income -- was beyond the reach of many poor families.
Many years later, in the United States, I would celebrate my own wedding. My wife and I have talked about this on more than one occasion: that our wedding was a wonderful opportunity to receive the blessings of our family and friends and to celebrate with them. But we had felt ourselves to be married before that. We lived together, I had asked her, and she said yes. We had made the commitment in our hearts, we had voiced it out loud to each other, and we were living it every day.
A government does not have the ability to control the love and commitment that are in the hearts and minds of its people. It does not have the ability to create or prohibit families. It has only the ability to recognize them -- or not. If it does not, there is "hard" a price to pay by the families affected. (Taxes, child custody, hospital visitation, and inheritance are just a few examples.) There is also a "soft" price to pay by the broader society, which experiences the degradation of a critical social contract and a split between private and public, personal and civic morality.
This coming November, Minnesota will become the latest state in which a majority votes on the marriage rights of a minority. (In this case, marriage between gays is already denied in law, but so great is the fear of the deniers that they want to move the ban into the state constitution.) Minnesota is as powerful and as powerless as Sierra Leone in this matter. To any Minnesotans reading this: do the right thing in November. Recognize Minnesota families. Vote no on the constitutional marriage ban.
No comments:
Post a Comment