Mikarrhea

Date: 3/8/2004

To: Editor, Newton TAB
From: Mika Cooper
Newton



The drive for a constitutional amendment to prohibit same-sex marriage (SSM) flouts our nation's foundational promise of liberty to form associations and pursue happiness as we choose, unencumbered by religious strictures accorded the force of law.

In pronouncing SSM a desecration of our hallowed tradition and rebuffing duly betrothed couples of the same sex, our government applies an incontrovertibly religious test, a usurpation categorically offensive to our constitution. That the framers may have been too blinded by their era's prejudice against homosexuality to decry this infringement (most also repudiated racial and sexual equality, to their discredit) does not license our being so.

Even had marriages everywhere always been restricted to one man and one woman (they haven't), that fact would justify nothing. That some with power have ever denied cherished benefits to others without supports no argument at all. Slaveholders opposed to emancipation, masculinists to women's suffrage, British colonizers to American self-rule—all loudly brandished history and tradition to defend contemptible, self-interested views, as SSM's detractors do now.

To contend today's nationwide wildfire of enthusiasm for SSMs threatens, rather than bolsters, the institution of marriage is absurd on its face. The true villains bleeding that institution of its historically rich and various cultural meanings are the hypocrites pretending to see in marriage's essence no value more fundamental than spouses' capacity to reproduce sexually together. These sophists' conspicuous failure to deplore beside SSMs myriad heterosexual marriages marked by infertility, however, confirms it's not procreative potential they disinterestedly venerate but SSM alone they despise.

I wholeheartedly support Michael Striar's call on Mayor Cohen to brook no longer in Newton the flagrant violation of the promise of equality and religious neutrality enshrined in the constitutions of our state and nation. Mayor Cohen, make Newton proud; start performing SSMs tomorrow!