I am against gay marriage. To be fair, I am against marriage in general, when we're talking about a government-sanctioned institution. The government doesn't do christenings. I don't recall having to fill out a form at a county office before my bar mitzvah. There has never been a funeral approved by a state official.
Today, 217 years after the U.S. government was forbidden from enacting any law "respecting an establishment of religion," the state is still overseeing a religious rite. In the passionate debate over the definition of marriage, Americans must ask themselves if their government should be in the marriage business at all.
The time is right for a compromise. As homosexuality rapidly becomes acceptable within mainstream values, the push to specifically deny rights to gay and lesbian Americans is increasingly limited to religious fundamentalists who treat every word of the Bible as unquestionable truth.
While these fundamentalists must not be underestimated in either numbers or loudness, they are unquestionably on the margins.
Vice President Dick Cheney has long supported equal rights for homosexual couples who wish to form a legal union. Recently, even President Bush, the most conservative president in three generations, announced, "I don't think we should deny people rights to a civil union, a legal arrangement."
So what is holding up the equal protection for all citizens guaranteed by the 14th Amendment, a guarantee which would surely apply to gay Americans as much as it does to African-Americans?
The government's job is to uphold individual rights, not religious institutions. State governments should leave the practice of marriage and all its baggage to churches, synagogues and mosques. Instead, they should simply issue the same basic guarantee of rights - call it a civil union or any other name - to every couple that applies for one. For most Americans, the marriage process would be very much the same as it is today: a stop to fill out a civil contract and then a ceremony at the religious institution of one's choice. Religions that don't want to recognize the unions would be under no obligation to do so.
The idea would be controversial at first, simply because it would require a change in citizens' comprehension of government's place in their lives. But such changes have been made before, as recently as the 1980s, with the large-scale deregulation of industry.
If Americans can deal with airline overexpansion and power grid failures, they can deal with a government that no longer meddles with religion.
This process starts, of course, right here in the Ocean State. Roger Williams, Rhode Island's founder, didn't just practice freedom of religion. He invented it.
With Vermont and Massachusetts already guaranteeing equal protection to all their citizens and Connecticut poised to do the same, Rhode Island could become an island of intolerance in the midst of progress.
Instead, we should grab the mantle of moderation and start a movement that fulfills the promise of equal rights while actually providing bonuses for both true conservatives and religious fundamentalists. The conservatives would see a smaller government, and the fundamentalists would see more moral authority ceded directly to churches.
The best way to prevent government from tampering with religion is to thoroughly separate the two. The colonists of Roger Williams' Rhode Island weren't anti-religion; in fact, in many cases they were much more religious than their counterparts elsewhere. They simply understood that the state should not tamper with the affairs of the church. Religious institutions should be responsible for the moral implications of human actions; government should be responsible for the implementation of human rights.
Ethan Ris '05 is a political science concentrator.
