Marriage--No One Should Be Exempt

Have you sat down yet and read Proposition 22? The initiative in the March 7 election prohibiting homosexuals from getting legally married in California?

Well, I mean, he’s got some nerve, state Sen. Pete Knight does, writing this thing and collecting signatures and getting it on the ballot.

Here’s the text of Proposition 22, all 14 words of it:

“Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.”

Oh, sure, Knight says this is about natural law and God’s law and Adam-and-Eve-Not-Steve, about not pronouncing two people husband and husband, or wife and wife.

“They want to be accepted as normal people living a normal lifestyle that should be accepted as normal,” says the Palmdale legislator. “That’s the problem.”

But who does Knight think he is, extending special protections to homosexuals? Because that’s what this measure would do, and don’t for a minute let him tell you it wouldn’t.

The initiative’s sponsoring group is called the Protection of Marriage Committee. Be honest, folks--it ought to be called the Protection FROM Marriage Committee.

I stand foursquare against special treatment, and Prop. 22 is all about coddling homosexuals.

Why should they be special? Why should they be protected and exempted from the rigors and demands and miseries of matrimony?

Take a moment to contemplate the unfairness of it all. Two heterosexuals meet, date, hit it off, maybe even move in together, and pretty soon one or the other of them is dropping hints about a wedding.

But no gay man or woman in the nation has to squirm and rationalize and tell the significant other, “Darling, I’d love to marry you but . . .”--and then pick an excuse. My mother needs me, we should wait until we finish school, I’m not ready to settle down, I was married before and it didn’t work out, marriage just ruins everything.

Instead, the law simply hands gays, gift-wrapped, the best reason of all for dodging the altar: “I love you but I can’t marry you because it’s against the law.” Who can argue with that?

So along comes Prop. 22, which would give homosexuals an absolutely bulletproof protection against getting caught up in marriage’s 50% failure rate, in nasty alimony and property settlement hearings.

For them, no weepy court custody battles over children, adopted or biological, no court-supervised visitation schedules. No big checks to make out to divorce lawyers.

And what of the marriage penalty, the extra tax paid by a working married couple filing jointly. We’re talking about an average of $1,100, $1,200 or more a year.

Why should gay couples get the benefit of a tax dodge to shirk their fair share of the burden?

While he and she are burning the midnight oil to pay the marriage penalty, double-income gay couples are burning the candle at a table at some smart little bistro, or having an out-of-town weekend lark at some resort--living it up on the $1,500 they should be handing over to the government like the rest of us! How galling!

And Pete Knight, banging the gong for heterosexual marriage, wants you--the voters, the taxpayers--to institutionalize this unfairness.

If that isn’t discrimination, what is?

I plan to vote against this blatant special-interest protection. Let ‘em get married. Make ‘em suffer like the rest of us.

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With the new year came a new California law allowing same-sex couples to register as domestic partners. For the price of $10, cheaper than a wedding license, they get hospital visitation rights and health insurance coverage for the partner if the other is a state employee.

Homosexual marriage is illegal in California, and always has been.

To anyone accusing Knight of grandstanding with a redundant initiative--among them his gay son, David, who characterizes it as a “knee-jerk reaction to a subject about which [Knight] knows nothing and wants to know nothing”--the senior Knight would say something like this:

State law must be shored up against just such encroachments as this domestic partners thing, which his GOP colleague, Steve Baldwin of El Cajon, calls “the proverbial camel’s nose in the tent for gay marriage.”

This would be a different tent, then, from the big one that Baldwin’s party announced it would be raising in the interests of inclusion, the tent that calls itself pro-family, but only if it’s the right kind of family.

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Patt Morrison substitutes today for vacationing columnist Mike Downey. Morrison’s e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com.