Distribution: world
Followup-To: 
Organization: SAI Technology, San Diego, CA
Subject: Re: Gay Marriages?
Keywords: marriage, 14th Amendment, gays, lesbians
Date: Thu, 19 Nov 1992 03:01:18 GMT

I wasn't aware that the constitution had anything at all explicitly to do with the issue of marriage.  Marriage is a particular contractural arrangement that has been institutionalized in our civilization as a way of legally recognizing this centuries (millenia?)-old form of relational bonding between human beings, purely so that the marriage-partners can in some situations be considered a "single entity".  (I'm speaking strictly from a legal point of view -- the personal definition of marriage means as m



any different things as there are marriages.)

The fact that until recently few people have considered that this could mean same-gender relationships does not change the fact that it boils down to a legal distinction, for the convenience of our society, arising (in the U.S.A.) out of an interpretation of our Constitution and Bill of Rights.  I think Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Association could be interpreted as not excluding whomever one chooses with which to enter into a spousal relationship.  If we agree that all human-beings are created equal



, and that a person's gender does not qualify that equality, there really isn't much else constitutionally that would disqualify same-gender marriages.

On the point Mitchell makes about the 14th amendment "expanding the rights of certain political factions", I find this nonsensical from the point of view that we are not discussing political factions, we are talking about human beings with equal rights (or not).  Nothing is being expanded by allowing same-gender marriages, rather a discrimination is being eliminated.  That the only argument people seem to have is moralistic would seem to make this more clear.

The founders of our Constitution et al *did* forsee that they couldn't forsee every possible situation, and invented the mechanisms for us to re-interpret and modify specific laws to suit the changes that they knew would face our society in the future.  

With regard to rights, it is not clear that ONLY rights which are spelled out are valid.  I actually believe that we default to ALL rights which are not explicitly denied, including those rights that noone may have thought of yet.  And those denials are subject to change.

To make a technical analogy, the designers of Ethernet never expected to have to accomodate appletalk packets on the same cable.  It wasn't that they thought appletalk was wrong or bad, they didn't even know about it -- they focused only on the particular parameters within which they wanted to work.  The same logic can be applied to the marriage laws.  I imagine that when those laws were being written, no one explicitly intended to exclude same-gender marriages.  The wording probably was simply an artifac



t of defaulting to what people were "used to" and that it never occured to anyone at that time that there was any other way of looking at it.  We have gained knowledge about the way people and relationships work, just as we have gained knowledge about computer networks and reality.  It is time to expand the spec of marriage to include additional protocols as people find them useful. 

 
+Keith

--
O  Keith F. Pilotti                                                      --O
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