As a recent Gallup survey indicates that self-identified conservatives are the nation’s largest ideological group, two of the nation’s most prominent conservative leaders have gone to the presses articulating the case for marriage equality.
In the New York Daily News, Roberty Levy, Chairman of the Cato Institute, the nation’s leading libertarian organization, makes a strong argument in favor of allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry:
No compelling reason has been proffered for sanctioning heterosexual but not homosexual marriages. Nor is a ban on gay marriage a close fit for attaining the goals cited by proponents of such bans. If the goal, for example, is to strengthen the institution of marriage, a more effective step might be to bar no-fault divorce and premarital cohabitation. If the goal is to ensure procreation, then infertile and aged couples should be precluded from marriage.
Instead, most states have implemented an irrational and unjust system that provides significant benefits to just-married heterosexuals while denying benefits to a male or female couple who have enjoyed a loving, committed, faithful and mutually reinforcing relationship over several decades. That’s not the way it has to be. Government benefits triggered by marriage could just as easily be triggered by other objective criteria, leaving the definition of marriage in the hands of private institutions.
Yet our politicians, unwilling to privatize marriage, seem congenitally unable to extricate themselves from our most intimate relationships. One would hope, in the coming months and years, that more enlightened federal and state legislators will have the courage and decency to resist morally abhorrent and constitutionally suspect restrictions based on sexual orientation. Gay couples are entitled to the same legal rights and the same respect and dignity accorded to all Americans.
As former United States Solicitor General, Ted Olson prepares to go to trial challenging the Constitutionality of California’s Proposition 8, he has penned a column in Newsweek making the conservative case for gay marriage.
Legalizing same-sex marriage would also be a recognition of basic American principles, and would represent the culmination of our nation’s commitment to equal rights. It is, some have said, the last major civil-rights milestone yet to be surpassed in our two-century struggle to attain the goals we set for this nation at its formation.
This bedrock American principle of equality is central to the political and legal convictions of Republicans, Democrats, liberals, and conservatives alike. The dream that became America began with the revolutionary concept expressed in the Declaration of Independence in words that are among the most noble and elegant ever written: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
A succesful challenge in Court by Olson would likely pave the way for marriage equality to be taken up by the United State Supreme Court, possibly setting a national presedence for the right of gay and lesbian couples to marry.
Posted: January 11th, 2010 under From the Right, GOP Progress, In Focus, Issues in Focus.
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