Today, New York governor, David Patterson, announced he is planning on submitting a bill to legislators to legalize same sex marriage in New York state. Is the tide possibly turning?
About a week ago, the supreme court in Iowa stated it was unconstitutional to deny marriage to same sex couples. A little later, Vermont was able to override the governor’s veto on same sex marriage to make it legal.
We can be hopeful that legislators are waking up to the fact that denying one group of people the same rights as the rest of the nation is unconstitutional. Discrimination has no place our laws.
I was looking around for newspapers articles that may support my claims that we are heading in a new direction, and was sad to find this article by David Benkof in the New York Daily News, “In Vermont gay marriage law, hidden victory for religious freedom.“
Basically, the story says that the new law that passed in Vermont says that organizations who are opposed to same sex marriage are protected under law from law suits that result in them refusing services to same sex weddings. The author, David Benkof, argues that people who are morally opposed to same sex marriage should have the right to deny services to those who are getting married. He suggests it is ethically acceptable to discriminate based on supposed religious beliefs. One perceived wrong brought about by more rights being attained by same sex couples happened in California. Benkoff writes:
“The California Supreme Court ruled last year that providers of in-vitro fertilization must perform the procedure on women in lesbian relationships even if they believe strongly that children need both mothers and fathers.”
A doctor’s idea that they have the right to deny a child to someone, because they ultimately think that raising a child in a home with two women will cause harm to the child is absurd and at the heart of what’s wrong in this patriarchal system. I think the real threat in that situation is that a child will be without a man in the home, and the thought of a child being raised without a man would mean that the exertion of male dominance in the home would be lost.
Maybe, someday, the ideas of the masses will catch up with what some lawmakers are already coming to terms with; that denying anyone the same rights as the rest of the country is wrong.
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