Thread: This gay marriage thing is blowin' up

Originally Posted by benzss

How can the constitution cover voluntary association? I don't get it.

What are gay couples asking for that government needs to provide?

Uhhh, all the benefits and privileges that married straight couples get? For instance, if you are married and your spouse gets hit by a truck and is in a vegetative state, you get to make the call on whether to continue life support; if you aren't married and this happens to your partner, you have no legal right to have a say in that decision, and their parents will get to decide instead. Or if you are married and you die, your spouse can continue to receive your social security benefits (and medicare, pensions, etc.). And if you die without a will your spouse also receives your property, while if you are unmarried and die without a will, your partner has no claim to your property and it will instead go to your next of kin. There are also various tax benefits to being married. And a whole bunch of stuff about child custody and such. Joint insurance policies. Various immigration-related stuff. Wrongful death benefits. Decision-making power over how a dead spouse's remains are to be handled/buried. The list goes on and on. If you want to know more, just google "benefits of marriage" or something like that. The US federal government extends over a thousand different rights/benefits/privileges to married couples, all of which are denied to gay couples (either because they can't marry at all, or in the handful of states where they can marry, because DOMA still prevents them from receiving those benefits).

Whether the government should provide these benefits to ANY married couples, gay or straight, is a different question. I'm not entirely unsympathetic to the idea that marriage should be an entirely private affair--voluntary association, as you say--with the government's only role being to provide the legal enforcement behind whatever contract (if any) the people involved draw up, just as it would with any other legally binding contract. But that's not the issue at hand. As long as the government is providing myriad benefits to straight couples who marry, it's unconstitutional for it to deny the same benefits to gay couples who do the same thing.