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The Joy of Gay Marriage
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| Contributor | MadViking |
| Last Edited | MadViking Mar 03, 2008 04:43pm |
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| Category | Commentary |
| News Date | Monday, March 3, 2008 10:00:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | The AIDS epidemic, in retrospect, made same-sex marriage inevitable. Americans watched as gay men were turned away at their partners' hospital rooms and denied basic rights granted to heterosexual couples coping with a spouse's terminal illness and death. As the gay civil rights movement gained a life-and-death urgency, the public started to come around, and it has been coming around ever since, at an accelerating rate. As recently as 1993, the year Tom Hanks did his Oscar turn as an AIDS victim in ''Philadelphia,'' fewer than a dozen Fortune 500 companies offered domestic partners health benefits and even a city as relatively progressive as Atlanta erupted over extending them to its employees. That now seems a century, not a decade, ago: today even Wal-Mart is among the nearly 200 such companies offering these benefits, and even a conservative city like Cincinnati is contemplating the repeal of antigay legislation, passed in 1993, that may be hindering its ability to recruit businesses.
But for all these changes, hundreds of federal marriage perks, from a survivor's right to a spouse's Social Security benefits to the sponsorship of foreign partners, are still denied to gay couples, including those who are granted separate-and-not-equal civil unions by local governments. That's why marriage, whatever the word's separate meaning as a spiritual or religious rite, will remain a pressing constitutional issue in a country founded on equality. If marriage laws were set in stone, after all, same-race marriage would still be the only legal kind. |
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