Posted on: Thursday, July 3, 2003

ISLAND VOICES
Reasons to ban gay marriages are shaky

By Duane D. Browning
Nightclub disc jockey in Honolulu

A few years ago, I voted to allow the state Legislature to have the power to define marriage as a union between one man and one woman. With the issue of gay marriage back in the news, I'd like its opponents to clarify a few of their arguments for me:

• "Allowing gay marriage would take away from the sanctity of heterosexual marriage." How? Men and women have been marrying each other for thousands of years, with mixed results. How would heterosexual marriage be less important or less likely if we allowed gays to marry?

• "Most of the major religions consider homosexuality an aberrant behavior." So what? Religions around the world condemn all sorts of things, like: eating certain kinds of foods, making statues, not attending religious services on certain days and converting to another religion. Will we rewrite our laws in order to accommodate the religious precepts of all the major world religions?

• "Allowing gay marriage would open the door to practitioners of all kinds of aberrant behavior to seek legitimacy." An interesting argument, perhaps with some justification. But, to claim that it would force the legalization of bestiality, pedophilia and incest is something of a stretch and ignores the fact that there is a compelling state interest to prohibit such behavior.

• "Allowing gay marriage would cause thousands of confused young people to accept homosexual inclinations as normal, and they would begin to actively practice homosexuality." If you don't have homosexual desires in the first place, you're not going to act on them. Most people, male and female, who experience homosexual desires in their lifetime never act on them, and I don't see how legalizing gay marriage would cause that to change.

• "Homosexuality is not an immutable characteristic. Homosexuals can change to heterosexuals, with proper counseling, and thousands have. Legalizing gay marriage would dramatically curtail efforts to save people from being homosexual." Even with gay marriage prohibited by law, anti-gay ministries have had dismal results trying to turn homosexuals into heterosexuals. The actual numbers of people who have been changed is very low, with frequent relapses into homosexual behavior. I don't see how the prospects for such programs could get any worse.

I await the response from the anti-gay-marriage lobby.