Letter: Make gay marriage legal and move on

To the community,

As a lawyer, I find all this excitement around the Supreme Court about gay marriage to be strange. Surely the court will notice that we have a Constitution that ensures that we will not discriminate against anyone and that we already tried separate but equal and it did not work.

There are weird and wonderful folks in all groups, racial, religious, young or old.

Ted Long

I believe that the resistance to gay marriage rest on people’s fears and secret dislike of the lifestyle. Fear mostly.

Marriage was introduced by men; men who wanted a solution to the inheritance issue, to make sure property stayed in family hands. And perhaps more important, to stem the spread of syphilis, the deadly disease that was spreading out of control at the time. The notion of children and religion is a recent innovation.

Those opposed say gay marriage will undermine the family and the notions of marriage. In my experience most people get married cause they like each other or they have a hidden agenda, used to be to have sex, but all that has changed.

But what about the facts? First of all the notion of family has changed dramatically in the past 60 years or so, with both parents working, married or not, and the ever increasing number of single parents. Perhaps they should attack the notion of a two-job family, seems like that takes more parents out of the home then a gay couple. The most disturbing fact is divorce. If any thing is a threat to marriage, it is divorce. From a religious standpoint divorce used to be treated like their notions of present day gay marriage. In many organized religions divorce was forbidden. You were cast out and no doubt would go to hell or face some other fatal state. That all changed. Why? Public pressure, and today no one thinks twice about it.

I wonder how those opponents justify the fact that they can stand in front of their god, in the church of their choice and swear, “For better or for worse” and later get a divorce. It seems to me that this is far worse, in their god’s eye than two same sex persons committed to one another wanting to share a life together. The fact is over 53 percent of all marriages end in divorce and I would be willing to bet some of those gay couples will divorce also. Seems to me they are just like the rest of us.

For me any way, marriage is no more about all the religious, or so called scared family stuff then a person’s color or gender or size or any thing makes them any different from the rest of us. I only hope that we can stop this silliness and address the real issues, like poverty, war and education. Could it be those that don’t want you to question those things are delighted that they have so many of you engaged in these silly issues?

Time to face your fears and stereotypes, and get on with it.

Ted Long, South Lake Tahoe