Marriage Protection Week, Part I [10.22.03]

So did we all have fun celebrating Marriage Protection Week? What?! You've never even heard of it? Well, let me tell you all about it.

President Bush recently declared last week to be Marriage Protection Week, a time that "provides an opportunity to focus our efforts on preserving the sanctity of marriage and on building strong and healthy marriages in America," according to the official White House press release.

He might as well have called it "Officially Sanctioned Religious Gay-Bashing Week," because that’s all it really is. There is no other agenda behind Marriage Protection Week than denouncing same-sex marriages. The second paragraph of the press release begins, "Marriage is a union between a man and a woman..."

Now call me crazy, but to me marriage is a union based on love, on a desire to spend the rest of your existence with the one person who makes you happier than anyone else in the world.

If Bush really cared about "building strong and healthy marriages," he would focus his efforts on Las Vegas wedding chapels and the Fox Network, not gays and lesbians. If anything ever threatened the sanctity of marriage, it was Fox's "Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire?"

Darva Conger, the woman who "won," promised the millionaire (who actually wasn't) that she would love, honor, and cherish him for all eternity. The only thing she was going to cherish was all the money she thought he had.

In contrast, my mother is not allowed to marry the woman she has been in love with and committed to for over 20 years.

In an article about Marriage Protection Week, Don Hodel, president of the conservative group Focus on the Family, says this about his own marriage: "I need [my wife] Barbara's support to be an effective, productive member of society, and she needs my support to be an effective, productive member of society. If we're separated from that, neither of us will achieve our full potential. And society will be robbed of at least a portion of the reward that comes from whatever labors we pursue."

How can Mr. Hodel not understand that my mom feels exactly the same way about her partner? What makes his relationship any more meaningful than my mom’s?

He even has the nerve to say that "same-sex relationships that mimic marriage will always be a counterfeit of marriage, because man and man and woman and woman were simply not created to share that kind of intimate union."

"That kind of intimate union"? Mr. Hodel, I pity the millions of heterosexual married couples who will never experience the level of intimacy my mom and her partner share, and I pity you for your inability to comprehend that.

Mr. Hodel is also a big proponent of the Federal Marriage Amendment (FMA). The FMA is a proposed constitutional amendment that would make same-sex marriages unconstitutional.

It would seem to me that the FMA contradicts this other part of the Constitution that forbids Congress from regulating religion. An amendment banning same-sex marriages would effectively force traditional Christian beliefs on all of America. To quote Mr. Hodel once again, same-sex marriage "is an absolute negation of the Judeo-Christian value system upon which our laws and Constitution are based"

Mr. Hodel believes that allowing same-sex marriages brings society closer to "godless tyranny." But the Bible says that God is Love, and I believe that the hate and intolerance he preaches are much more dangerous to society than the legal recognition of true love between two men or two women.