The Free View-- weblog of a presidential candidate

On Gay Marriage

I think that someone should be allowed to marry whomever they please. In fact, I don't think the government has any place getting involved in the decision at all.

What is marriage? Webster's says, "A close union." Do we really want the government deciding who we can form "close unions" with? I think probably not. I actually don't want the government having any say in any of my "unions" with anybody.

If we don't want the government deciding who we can work for, be friends with, go to the movies with, do business with, or live with, then why would we want them interfering with the most sacred of human unions, marriage?

Last week I posited that we are each our own little life experiments, and I said, in effect, "The more experimenting, the more results." Well, with marriage, what you have is two people who desire to bond their lives together in a way that they truly believe will be a greater whole than the original parts. They are trying to increase the value of their individual lives by combining their efforts. To me, that sounds like a damn noble thing to do, and it disgusts me to think that our United States government, and many of its states' governments, are taking it upon themselves to ban certain folks from forming this union.

What if they discovered that certain family lineages, or even certain races, exhibited a tendency toward, say, violence, or crime or perversion or something, and they decided to ban unions between those folks?** What if it was your family or race they wanted to stop? Would you be content to accept that a certain group of people had decided you weren't allowed to marry the person you wanted to marry? I think probably not.

Listen, I am not gay, and I have no plans to be. But I say, "Let 'em live! Let them bond. Bonding is good." Like I said before, people who want to marry want to make their lives (and presumably, the lives around them) just that much better. Who is anyone to stand in the way of that?

If you are still opposed to gay marriage at this point, please try this experiment for me: Institute a fifty-year ban on marriage and/or child-rearing in your family. Then write to me, in fifty years, at lance@freedom2008.com , and tell me how it turned out. If it's a fun story, I'll publish it here in my column. Good luck.

**6/22/03 NOTE: I didn't mean to imply here that gay people have any of the tendencies I named. Claims of social or genetic inferiority have been the justification for nearly every scheme to ban various marriage combinations throughout history, including the efforts against gay marriage. If someone were to seek to prohibit a given reader in the future from marrying in general, it would almost certainly be based on the same claims that have been used for centuries -- ones that were used against blacks, and latinos, and European immigrants, and lower classes, and mentally handicapped people, and so on.

I posted a brief addendum to this article in 2001. You can read it here.