Gay marriage should be legal in the United States.

Let me thank Mongeese for not making this debate a carbon copy of the previous debates that have been done on Gay marriage. Your argument is both original and captivating. ======= Case Pro- Rebuttals ======= ---> "My argument will be that government should have no authority over marriage." Marriage is a fundamental right of liberty. The United States Supreme Court has ruled this to be the case some 42 years ago. [1] Therefore my opponent's claim has no sort of standing legal precedent or logical basis whatsoever. ---> "However, if other married people no longer enjoy these legal protections, gays would no longer have anything to complain about." No, society would still be facing the same problem at that point. Only this time even more people would have their basic rights taken away. ---> "Now, in order to uphold the 14th amendment, we'd have to go further than granting marriage rights to gays. We'd have to grant them to pedophiles, people who wish to marry multiple people, people who wish to marry animals, people who wish to marry inanimate objects, and people who wish to marry abstract ideas." I must admit that I'm unused to facing slippery slope arguments about gay marriage that advocate for a walls right to marry. [2] Animals, walls, and abstract ideas aren't people with the legal rights associated with people. It would therefore be meaningless to speak of their right to marry or to get married. Contention 1: "It is illegal for marriage to be legal in the United States." - mongeese There is nothing explicitly religious about the institution of marriage. In our modern secularized country anyone can get married in a courthouse without having religion ever involved in the matter whatsoever. [3] To claim that marriage is a religious institution is therefore false. It may have had its roots in religion at one point, although that would be a simplistic understanding, but that doesn't mean that it's a religious institution in our present society. Moreover, I have already shown you with my first source that the Supreme Court has ruled that marriage is a fundamental right to liberty. Indeed, it is legal for marriage to be legal. Contention 2: "It is discriminatory for marriage to be legal in the United States." -mongeese This is an interesting argument, but completely irrelevant. It deals with the legal protections that should be afforded under marriage and says nothing of who should be able to marry. I will simply make the case that everyone should be allowed to marry even if we end up deciding that married people shouldn't receive tax cuts over single people. Moreover, the government has a vested interest in helping marriage via tax cuts and other measures, because functional marriages are necessary in order to promote social stability. With this in mind the removal of marriage would be likely to foster societal dysfunction. Marriage helps people collaborate on a common project and it gives children a safe environment in which to learn and grow. If you remove marriage by abolishing it you will deal a tremendous blow to the social, economic, and legal structure of modern civilization. Contention 3: "The United States lacks the power to legalize gay marriage." -mongeese According to the Tenth Amendment [4]: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." I have already made a strong argument that the Constitution of the United Sates guarantees the right to gay marriage under the equal protection and due process clause of the 14th amendment. Therefore the people of the United Sates that have voted to ban gay marriage in their state can all go screw themselves. They don't have the necessary power to override the Constitution of the United Sates. And since this is the case it would follow that individual states could not prevent gay marriage because doing so would violate the 14th amendment of our constitution. ======= Conclusion: ======= My opponent's arguments are interesting and… well they're interesting. But they do not serve to refute any of my four arguments. And apart from a few slippery slopes and other fallacious contentions my opponent has not presented a compelling argument that gay marriage should be banned. Banning gay marriage is unconstitutional and since the United States Supreme Court has declared that marriage is a fundamental liberty it follows from this that gay marriage should be legalized. (Resolution affirmed) Sources: [1] http://en.wikipedia.org... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org... [3] http://www.alachuaclerk.org... [4] http://www.archives.gov... Best, Freeman