Distribution: world
Followup-To: 
Organization: SAI Technology, San Diego, CA
Subject: Re: Gay Marriages? [Corrected REPOST]
Keywords: marriage, 14th Amendment, gays, lesbians
Date: Thu, 19 Nov 1992 04:01:23 GMT

[This version differs only in that the formatting is readable!]

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 lega l 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 whomeve r 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
qualif y 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 tha t we are not discussing political factions, we are
talking about human beings wit h 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 an d 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 t o 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 "use
d 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 an d 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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