The gay rights debate permeates our society today. Dialogue on the topic is everywhere. Some are calling it a basic human right and others say the gay rights movement is this generation’s version of the civil rights movement.
They might be right. I am admittedly skeptical of these statements, but I believe gay marriage should be legal. Not because I think it is a basic human right, but because I believe in a hands-off government. Because of this, I think there is a fundamental hypocrisy in the marriage debate right now. If gay marriage should be legal, why shouldn’t plural marriage?
Most of the debate against gay marriage applies to plural marriage (most commonly known as polygamy), including the restructuring of the idea of a traditional family and religious values.
But polygamy is unique in that laws prohibiting it directly infringe on the right to religious freedom.Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints and Muslims have the same right to freedom as the gay community, and yet in a 2011 Gallup poll, where 53 percent of Americans said homosexuality should be legal, only 11 percent viewed polygamy as morally acceptable.
So what happens to a polygamist Muslim family in the United States? Is the second wife left to fend for herself with no legal rights if something happens to her husband? It is the same debate that comes from homosexual couples that if their partner is injured they have no decision-making power.
Furthermore, we constantly discuss homosexuality and polygamy under the guise of the “definition of marriage” but what purpose does that definition serve except to discriminate and detract from our right to privacy?
What is the reasoning behind marriage laws? Austin Nimocks of the Alliance Defense Fund, a conservative Christian consulting group, put it best in a May 2012 NPR interview when he said that there are two requirements to get a marriage license— that you be of age, and of opposite sex.
The government does not ask couples if they are in love, or if they are committed to each other, Nimocks said. And that is because the government cares about marriage purely for the economics of it: the taxes and the children.
If we want to keep the right to privacy, we may have to give up the comfort of historical norms. There should be no exceptions in our rights to privacy and true marriage equality.
