The freedom homosexuals have found to live together without condemnation, to love whom they will without being called monsters, and to express themselves without fear has been long in coming and, in some ways, still incomplete. In many parts of the world, they are denied even basic human rights. In Iran, Mauritania, Qatar, Sudan, and Saudi Arabia, they are killed, according to sharia law. In Syria, members of the Islamic State threw a gay man from a seven-story building. After surviving the fall, he was stoned to death by a mob.
In Syria, members of the Islamic State threw a gay man from a seven-story building.
While homosexuals face none of these terrors in the United States, they still don’t have the same privileges others do. When one partner dies, the other is not always entitled to bereavement leave from work, to file wrongful death claims, to draw Social Security from the deceased partner, or to automatically inherit shared assets. They are often not considered next of kin for the purposes of hospital visitation and emergency medical decisions, and they can’t put their partner on their health plan without paying taxes on the coverage.
Many privileges and obligations should be extended to homosexuals through civil partnerships and unions. Their right to make contracts concerning property and healthcare should be recognized and considered valid by the government because doing so does nothing to threaten social stability. These unions, after all, are personal and should not be denied by the state. It’s no one else’s business who loves whom or what they do with their own property.
Marriage Is a Social Institution, Not Just a Personal One
While there are still many things that can be done to overcome prejudice against homosexuals, marriage is not one of them. Unlike civil partnerships that are personal in nature, marriage is social. It’s social because it involves the creation and nurture of children.
State recognition of marriage is fundamentally about preserving the rights of children—which, in turn, promotes the public good.
State recognition of marriage is fundamentally about preserving the rights of children—which, in turn, promotes the public good. Individuals don’t just spring into existence as if they slipped from gel-filled pods in the Matrix or were manufactured along an assembly line in a Brave New World. They are born to one man and one woman, who share their DNA and who are intrinsic to their own identity.
Their sense of self, their stability as a person, their wholeness and happiness are bound to their biological parents. Their development as individuals is nurtured in the arms of those who are most intimately and inextricably connected to them, which makes the family the fundamental unit of a stable and free society. It is the best place where children flourish, the civil society is stabilized, and government is limited. When children grow up under the authority of their parents and nurtured by their love, they are protected from the control of an intrusive state.
Read the entire article at: http://thefederalist.com/2015/03/20/hurting-kids-isnt-the-way-to-make-gay-people-happy/
