Marriage - a Matter of Equal Rights for ALL

By Vesta Copestakes

This battle for Human Rights gets weary, like so many other battles for Human Rights. To have one segment of the human population tell another segment that they are not worthy of sharing the same rights is beyond understanding. But so many aspects of life are beyond understanding. Love seems so simple, so pure, and so much a part of everyday life. How can it be a battleground?

Protect Our Families
The argument that by denying the rights of marriage to gay and lesbian members of our family will protect our children, and therefore our families, is perhaps the least understandable argument of all. What part of commitment to love and a sense of belonging is dangerous to children?

Every parent knows the desire to protect our children and every parent knows that it's impossible on a grand scale. Our children are separate from us. They make their own decisions right from the start and they pay consequences for those decisions and therefore learn from them. Being homosexual has been proven to NOT be a decision. It's a BIOLOGICAL FACT.

Yes, there are some people - more women then men - who choose to love someone of the same sex out of frustration and anger as much as out of love. But even those people have to feel love in order to cross the boundaries between lust and love, between dating and commitment.

Learning that homosexual couples have sex is not enough to make a person homosexual. They either are or are not. So the argument that same sex relationships will be taught in our schools is ludicrous. Sex is taught in our schools only with the permission of parents. If parents don't want their children to lean about sex at school all they have to do is fill out a form and the kid won't be in that class.

But life - that's another issue entirely. How do you shelter a child from reading the newspaper, watching television or engaging in conversations? You don't. At some point in a child's life they will learn that people of the same sex fall in love just like heterosexuals. Love is love…period. Attraction brings people together, and from all the statistics on marriage, homosexuals have a much better commitment history than heterosexuals - by far! Peraps it's because they have fought such a hard battle just to love in the open that when they make the commitment, they do it with more conviction than male/female couples.

A Matter of Time
I was encouraged to see that Marie Osborn has came out in favor of same sex love. Her daughter or sister - or someone in her family, is homosexual. That's a real challenge for Mormons because homosexuality is, in essence, against their religion. Pity. They have such large families. Someone is bound to be homosexual. Do they reject each family member who is? Cast them out into the world as rejected? If religion is about strength of families and homophobia is as well, then this is not very comforting.

I read that Gavin Newsom's father, a judge and Catholic, has been profoundly against homosexual relationships and same sex marriage. I'm pretty certain he didn't raise Gavin with the concept that he should grow up to be a leader in the same sex marriage revolution. But even this man finally came to believe that he was wrong. Was it the inlfluence of son on father or just a matter of time.

Time is always on our side. Take any subject where people are filled with hate, rage, etc. and over time, sometimes hundreds of years, minds change. Experience is the great teacher. In this case sooner or later the haters will love someone who is homosexual. Not sexual love - family love. It makes them take a differnt look. Some do. Some don't. But the more people look at other people in terms of our similarities and less in term of differences, the more there is hope that marriage will be free to everyone who loves. Laws chnaged to allow differnt races to marry. Laws will change to allow different sexes to marry.

We still have a lot of work to do to bring peace to our families - and ultimately to our planet.