New York, Not North Korea and Gay Marriage
“You get to the point where you evolve in your life where everything
isn’t black and white, good and bad, and you try to do the right thing,”
New York State Senator Roy McDonald, a Republican from Saratoga,
said Tuesday. You hope to get there; McDonald did. He became the
thirty-first of sixty-two senators in Albany to say that he would vote
for a bill, submitted by Governor Andrew Cuomo, allowing
same-sex marriage in our state. McDonald’s statement, as captured
by the Daily News, continued,
You might not like that. You might be very cynical about that
Well, f— it, I don’t care what you think. I’m trying to do the right thing.
I’m tired of Republican-Democrat politics. They can take
the job and shove it. I come from a blue-collar background.
I’m trying to do the right thing, and that’s where I’m going with this.
I do like that; and who wants to be cynical? What, really, could be less
cynical
cynical
than a heartfelt commitment to marriage? The bill is only one
senator short now,
senator short now,
with a vote scheduled for Friday, and its proponents are optimistic
that another
that another
senator will have reached the point in his or her life that McDonald has.
Some
Some
of the pressure McDonald was shaking off came from religious groups.
Archbishop Timothy Dolan posted a diatribe against the bill on his blog
Tuesday, in which he wrote, “Last time I consulted an atlas, it is clear we
are living in New York, in the United States of America—not in China
or North Korea.” His point was not that gay marriage is allowed in those
places—it is not, though it is in Iowa and five other American states—
but that over there “communiquĂ©s from the government can dictate the
size of families, who lives and who dies, and what the very definition
of ‘family’ and ‘marriage’ means.” Is Dolan picturing a marriage
altar as a sort of death panel? Or does he just think all that should
be left to the church?
Dolan continues, And what about other rights, like that of a child
to be raised in a family with a mom and a dad?
That is, speaking very charitably, a non-sequitur. There are all sorts
of reasons children are raised in families that don’t include “a mom
and a dad”; Dolan must know that. Same-sex marriage isn’t one of
them. Maybe Dolan believes that divorce, in any circumstance,
violates a child’s rights; how about children adopted by gay parents—
does he believe that their rights would be protected by lingering in
foster care, bounced from non-home to non-home? Would he prefer
that those born to gay or lesbian parents had never existed? If so,
that is a pretty tangled position for a Catholic (or even for a writer
of North Korean communiqués). Does he think that children should
be taken away from gay parents (or single widowed parents, for
that matter) who have loved them all their lives to be given to any
heterosexual, or even just heterogeneous, couple? And even if he
agrees with all of that, what on earth does it have to do with same-
sex marriage? Allowing two people who love each other to marry
will not stop people who don’t love each other from separating, or
from getting married in the first place. Neither marriage nor love is
a scarce resource. And yet Dolan talks as though there were
thieves in his house.
If one’s only interest in all this is the rights of children, then gay
marriage is really an imperative. (There are other factors, too, of
course, that don’t depend on children: respect, fairness, kindness.)
Marriage can protect children—legally, financially, socially—and
same-sex marriage will give more parents more ways to protect more
children. Making that possible is surely the right thing to do.
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