Maine has a $1.4 billion budget deficit outlined in the 2009-2011 budget. The state’s bridges and roads are falling down around us. Health insurance, the lack of it, the need for it, and the prohibitive cost of it, is still a critical issue.
Education is expensive, the state needs more employers, property owners need less taxes and nobody can figure out why the state allows legal gambling in the governor’s hometown but won’t allow Maine’s Native American nations a piece of the pie.
All that and the number one thing everyone is talking about this week is same-sex marriage.
Thanks to the work of our elected officials, Maine is poised to become the fifth state in the Union to legalize same-sex marriage. That is at least until the citizen’s petition comes in. The same Governor, who passed anti-discrimination legislation with the stroke of his pen after Mainers rejected the issue at the polls twice within the previous 10 years, claims to be undecided about what he is going to do.
From where we stand this is a debate of little more substance than divisive talking points. It’s uncomfortable, and like any conversation where people cite moral authority, its difficult, but it is a conversation that a vocal minority is apparently insisting we have right now.
All right, then.
At its core, marriage is a legal contract and law-abiding adults enter and exit legal contracts all the time. The hang up seems to be the definition of the word “marriage” which supporters would have you believe is a union blessed by God meant to include one man and one woman. No less, no more.
The current legislation does not penalize churches for sanctioning whatever it determines to be marriage material, nor should it. Churches should be churches, and although not strictly followed, the separation of church and state is a clear tenet of the Constitution.
That said, we assert it is hypocritical to frame marriage strictly in religious terms. It is hard to take seriously the argument that a union of same-sex couples is an affront to God, while at the same time legally authorizing marriages blessed by such secular authorities as notary publics and ships’ captains.
If we are going to do this, and it appears that we are, it’s a semantic battle we’re waging. The simplest answer seems to be government should either allow anyone to marry whomever they want, or, more palatably, it needs to get out of the marrying business altogether.
Call it a civil union, call it a formal friends with benefits agreement; call it whatever you want, but if the state is going to grant a legal license to one pair of legal adults who want one, then we argue that the state has no basis to deny a license to every pair of legal adults who want one.
Since being a homosexual is not a crime in this state that, by definition, can’t be a basis for denying a secular marriage license.
We may not like what our neighbor does in the privacy of their own home, but like it or not, so long as general order is maintained, they should have the right to do it and whatever they’re doing, we have the constitutional obligation to mind our own business.
It is the same obligation our neighbor has when it comes to whatever activity we pursue in the privacy of our own home. Supporting someone’s right to do something is a completely different thing from liking it and one is not dependent on the other.
Churches on the other hand, do have and should have every right to determine whose union is worthy of official blessing and if we are to agree that marriage is a union blessed by God, (which is another argument altogether) then that is where the responsibility for defining the term “marriage” should stay.
