Why the fuss about same-sex marriage?

I don’t really understand why so many people are upset about same-sex marriages. Is it the idea of using the word “marriage‚” that upsets them or the actual union between two people of the same sex? It just doesn’t make much sense to me.

I wouldn’t want anybody to interfere in my marriage and I certainly have no desire to interfere in somebody else’s marriage. So why is it that these people who are opposed to same-sex marriage feel that they are so important that they can tell other people what they can and cannot do with the people they love?

I am neither qualified nor willing to offer any kind of advice to people who want to get married (gay or straight). Personally I don’t really care if a man wants to marry another man, or if two women get married. What bothers me most about all this is the amount of people who openly oppose gay marriages and even discriminate against gays and lesbians. What is the need for this kind of discrimination?

Gays and lesbians are good enough to work in our offices and receive services from us but they aren’t allowed to get married. It seems like our heterosexual society is just the big bully on the playground telling the little kids that they can play – over there‚ but not here. I don’t really read or hear of many reasons for this discrimination and opposition either.

Your newspaper article “Same sex marriage not acceptable‚” reported Tagak Curley as saying that marriage is defined as between “a man and a woman” and that same-sex marriage is unacceptable. A definition is just a jumble of words strung together so as to allow us to take meaning from them, and all definitions come from a book that is always being changed and updated anyhow.

What is it about same-sex marriage that makes it so unacceptable to our modern society? I’m pretty sure that two women who want to marry each other just want to spend the rest of their lives together, not come into your home and change the way your family functions.

The majority of reasons that I have heard for not allowing same-sex marriages are either religious in nature or notions that it will destroy the family unit. Our society, a long time ago, decided to take religion out of a lot of institutions such as the school system and the government. Our society decided that forcing our religion (whichever faith you belong to) on other people was morally and ethically wrong. We had decided that children in the school system should be able to make up there own minds about what to believe and we believe that our government should not be influenced by a religious bias.

So why are you forcing religion on gays and lesbians? Do you really believe that this is a morally and ethically valid practice? Denying gays and lesbians from marrying people of the same sex would be denying them their Charter rights. And if you’re going to do that you might as well just throw out the whole Charter of Rights And Freedoms that all Canadians citizens enjoy, because denying one Charter right and recognizing all others is unacceptable.

As for destroying the family unit, I don’t really see it. Two parents of the same-sex raising a child in a loving and caring environment just like any other family doesn’t seem too threatening. That seems more like creating another family unit, not destroying it.

Solomon Tagak
Iqaluit