Originally Posted by
pgwenthold
As for the state senator's comments, it always brings me back to the question that I continually ask: Honestly, how do the anti-gay people feel knowing that they are using the exact same arguments that are used by racists? You could take almost any anti-gay marriage rant and substitute "interracial" for "gay" and it would be something you would have heard 50 years ago.
Merits of the argument aside, such a realization would give me serious pause.
Actually, there is an importance difference between the two.
Let's assume that the question is whether dark-skinned people--a minority--ought to be allowed to vote. In the event that this right to vote is eventually put into place, the light-skinned people
actually do lose something. In particular, their voting power is diluted. If more people enter the voting pool, the power of a single vote is reduced.
Or if a court ruling determines that minority students ought to be allowed to attend a school that was previously attended only by students of the majority, the majority could
actually lose something: classroom space, teacher-to-student attention, convenience.
In the case of same-sex marriage, however, the granting of equal protection to same-sex couples deprives the opposite-sex couples of nothing. Voting power and schools are limited resources, but marriage is virtually an unlimited resource.
Indeed, the advocates argued to the Iowa Supreme Court that same-sex marriage would hurt opposite-sex marriage. The Court asked a simple question, "In what way?" There was no answer to this question that could withstand even modest scrutiny, and as far as I can tell there remains no reasonable answer today. Some people
feel that they have been hurt by the ruling, but they are unable to say
how.