Partnership Vows for Gay Couples

The San Francisco ceremony celebrating the domestic partnerships of 165 gay and lesbian couples (March 26) demonstrates more than true love in the face of adversity. It clearly illustrates that a second class of citizenship is alive and well in our democracy. Without the opportunity to participate in marriage, lesbians and gays are denied hundreds of rights and benefits automatically extended to heterosexual couples who choose to wed. This policy is as shameful an example of discrimination as the laws once banning interracial marriages in our country.

The distinction between full, legal civil marriage and domestic partnership is worth making as California now considers two bills (AB 1982 and AB 3227) that attempt to ban same-gender marriage. These bills would shut out one group of people from an institution most citizens take for granted. The creation of families--all kinds of families--is in the interest of the state both socially and economically.

Californians should oppose these mean-spirited attempts to limit the definition of family and instead encourage their elected officials to support the radical notion that we all “are created equal.” Second-class status for any group is simply unacceptable.

RICHARD KRAFT

Los Angeles

* I really find it quite nauseating and in extremely bad taste to show pictures of gay couples being “married” in San Francisco.

What more can I say?

MARY HILL

Anaheim

* Hats off to the city and county of San Francisco for acknowledging homosexual marriages. After all, we don’t want people living in sin!

JOSEPH GIUS

Los Angeles

* In “Domestic Partners Head Down the Aisle Slowly” (Commentary, March 27), Ellen Goodman displays the irresponsible thinking which usually accompanies such discussions on same-sex marriages; in fact, she boasts that rational discourse on the subject is all but impossible. She tells us that “it’s become harder and harder to muster a compelling or even logical case against same-sex marriages,” and “logic has little place in debates about homosexuality.”

Is this to say that the importance of the traditional family for the welfare and happiness of the community is beyond rational understanding, that it is only a myth? Moreover, if there is no rational defense of the family, then how can there be a rational defense of same-sex marriages?

The most thoughtful advocates of same-sex marriages make consent the basis for morality and therefore legality; but, as an enlightened people, are we not obliged to ask why? If the only basis for morality is consent, then it follows that incestuous relationships (and perhaps even “marriages”), so long as the father and daughter or mother and son “consent,” are to be afforded the same rights and privileges as traditional families. All of us should be struck by this, and realize that something is missing here: the only legitimate ground for morality, the “laws of nature and of nature’s God.” By denying a higher authority as the ground of morality, morality becomes anything we want it to be--and once a free people embrace this moral relativism, they cannot long endure.

THOMAS KRANNAWITTER

Ontario

* Goodman aptly describes the predicament faced by those opposed to same-gender civil marriage: Namely, that far from having a “compelling” reason, they can’t even make a logical argument for the discrimination. She leaves us with the mistaken impression, however, that their views will prevail.

What Goodman fails to mention is that more states have either defeated or withdrawn anti-marriage bills than have passed them. The rejection of such legislation in Colorado, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Mississippi, New Mexico, Rhode Island, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia and Wyoming indicates that logic and fairness do have a place in the debate after all.

HEATHER CARRIGAN

Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian

Community Services Center