withallyourmind.net

A third objection offered by those in favor of same-sex marriage is:

We shouldn’t be denied the freedom to love who we want.

Here are a couple of comments made by recently “married” lesbian couples in San Francisco:

Now we’re not second class citizens; now we can have a loving relationship like every other maried couple we know.

Anybody who is in love and wants to spend the rest of their life together should be able to do it.

These comments imply that same-sex marriages secure new liberties for homosexuals which have been denied them thus far. This is not the case as no personal liberty has been denied them. Everything which married couples can do, a gay couple can do, such as express love, set up housekeeping, share home ownership, have sex, raise children, receive inheritance, and spend the rest of their lives together.

Same-sex couples can even have big weddings. No law prevents that. Denying marriage licenses to same-sex couples does not restrict any liberty. Anyone of any age, race, gender, class, or sexual preference make make life-long loving commitments to each other. Certain entitlements may be denied, but not freedoms. Denying the state’s sanction on same-sex marriage onlly witholds social approval from a lifestyle which homosexuals have complete freedom to pursue without it. The issue is not liberty - it is respect.

Koukl, in the article at Townhall.com, of which this series is a summary, quotes other newly “married” same-sex couples:

It was a moving experience after a truly lifelong commitment, to have a government entity say, “Your relationship is valid and important in the eyes of the law.”

This is about other people recognizing what we have already recognized with each other for a long time.

I didn’t start out feeling this way, but that piece of paper, it’s just so important I can’t even put it into words. It’s so important to have society support you.

The marriage license does not confer liberty on same-sex couples. It confers legitimacy. In the word’s of Andrew Sullivan:

Including homosexuals within marriage would be a means of conferring the highest form of social approval imaginable.

So, same-sex marriage is not really about civil rights. It is about validation and respect for a lifestyle which many find “offensive, contrary to nature, socially destructive, and morally repugnant.” Koukl quotes Jeff Jacoby of The Boston Globe:

The marriage radicals have not been deprived of the right to marry – only of the right to insist that a single-sex union is a “marriage.” They cloak their demands in the language of civil rights because it sounds so much better than the truth: They don’t want to accept or reject marriage on the same terms that it is available to everyone else. They want it on entirely new terms. They want it to be given a meaning it has never before had, and they prefer that it be done undemocratically by judicial fiat, for example, or by mayors flouting the law. Whatever else that may be, it isn’t civil rights.

Next, a response to another objection.