The Morality of Gay Marriage

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 I was ltening to the BBC on Sunday 21st June 2009 at about 16.00hrs, feeling half awake after a long afternoon nap. A very articulate man was delivering a public lecture on the subject Morality, Politics, Faith and how these three variables influence our opinion on same sex marriage.

      The debate on the subject of gay marriage from the political and faith based perspectives most often suffer serious divergence of opinion to such extent that no point of convergence ever gets to be struck because the moral issues that endears politicians is nearly antithetical to those values that religious advocates espouse.

      Marriage within the domains of politics is institutionalized as a playground on which consenting male and female adults are players and they choose to marry with the core objectives of having children among other vital reasons such as intimacy, happiness, support and love. A consummated marriage is licensed by the state and at this point it become legalized. If this is how marriage is going to be viewed from the point of view of the state, then gay marriage falls far too short of what it takes to be regarded as a marriage which makes it a rather stupid pre-occupation to be engaged in and only people who morally corrupted identify with this kind of marriage.

       Yet in the generally libertarian societies of the world, where the freedom to act, say and do what one pleases is so exalted as a tenet of democracy, trying to configure the concept of marriage so rigidly to be understood as male-female affair suddenly becomes self defeating. This is the biggest dilemma of states that invariably find themselves at crossroads in the same sex marriage debate because when two consenting adults choose who to marry and live their lives with, to thwart their intentions with some state law would be to brutally infringe on their freedom. On the other hand, in many nation states, politics and morality are rooted in faith-based domains. In the Christian and Islamic nations of the world, there are conservative fundamentalists who see marriage outside the natural male-female arrangement as a perverted anathema because their religions would never permit this to happen. 

      Our world is indeed guided by values, which should cut across the political and religious boundaries. Should this therefore be a place where people who conceive the world differently ought to be suppressed and bundled away as perverts? To be more direct, do we count it justice to demonize same sex marriage? If justice is getting what you rightly deserve, then the world needs to rethink the appalling injustices the gay people endure in parts of the world where morality is blindly tugged to faith and political imperatives.

      The most just way forward in this stalemate is to privatize the Institution of marriage. Let the state pull itself completely from institution of marriage by removing away certain legal encumbrances, especially those to do with sex, so that when a person becomes of age, he/she can choose to marry another person who is also of age. Religious bodies should subject their faith to a revolution by coming out of the stereotypical understanding of marriage-the Church Minister should not pork his nose into choosing who marries who-theirs is to handle their flock without any double standards. The bottom line is the membership of such an individual to a given religious community. If he fulfills that, dictating what gender he marries will be violating the fundamental rights of these individuals. Taking this brand of bold steps would rid the world of the ugly debate about who marries who and it would hopefully, bring serenity to this world, which is already full of many difficulties.