Kinsley’s Take on Gay Marriage

Re “A Gay Marriage Success Story,” Commentary, Dec. 12: Michael Kinsley’s essay on the increasing acceptance of gay marriage suggests that if we are supple enough to change the meaning of “gay” from “joyful” to “homosexual,” a similar shift can occur in the meaning of marriage. But marriage isn’t just a word; it is an institution evolved over generations of human history as the best system for producing the next generation. The human infant is slow to develop and requires a lot of parenting. The historical team of mother and father does that best.

With so many of our children being born to unwed mothers and a high divorce rate, our system for producing the next generation is already in trouble. Casually opening the rite of marriage to same-sex couples in the interest of “fairness” will weaken an institution that needs strengthening, not dilution. Let’s keep the marriage license for men and women who are capable of conceiving and rearing the next generation and offer a different license to couples of any sex who either cannot or don’t want to do that.

Cornelius Deasy

San Luis Obispo

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To accept Kinsley’s premise that government-sanctioned, legalized gay marriage is in the same category as black and women’s civil rights is just plain nonsense. The latter represents justice served whereas the former contains all the seeds of moral decay, a path this country is headed down all too rapidly.

It also seems to me that having Kinsley be both a manager/editor and radical social commentary writer is akin to having a fox in the henhouse.

Darrach G. Taylor

Huntington Beach

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Kinsley strangely congratulates himself for the Aug. 28, 1989, publication of “one of the first articles on gay marriage in a mainstream publication” that he then believed to be “far out and unlikely to happen,” but now is amazed at how quickly gay people have been accepted into American life.

But he gives little credit to several facts:

(1) The first publicized same-sex wedding was in 1953, though unpublicized weddings occurred in Harlem during the 1920s.

(2) The Metropolitan Community Church, founded in L.A. and now a worldwide Protestant denomination, began marrying gay and lesbian couples in 1970.

(3) The first lawsuits seeking to legalize gay marriage occurred in the 1970s -- 1971 in Minnesota, 1973 in Kentucky, 1974 in Ohio and Washington.

(4) Two marriage licenses to gays were issued in 1975 -- one in Arizona, the other in Colorado -- but were later revoked.

(5) The ACLU voted in favor of legalizing gay marriages in 1986.

(6) A high-profile gay wedding of some 2,000 same-sex couples occurred in 1987 during the National March on Washington of the National Organization for the Advancement of Lesbian and Gay Couples. Kinsley’s editorial decision came rather late indeed.

Michael Haas

Los Angeles

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Re “Democrats Could Pursue Liberal Principles Over a Political Cliff,” Dec. 13: For the life of me, I can’t understand why the right wing opposes gay marriage. Marriage is a stabilizing force for society. Its opposites are loneliness, cohabitation and promiscuity. Is that what radical right-wingers want for Americans?

Paula Berinstein

Thousand Oaks