It's a new year, and I'm still hung up on my same old boring political issue: equal rights for everybody. Well, it's on my mind, and I have a blog, so I guess I may as well write it down.
I've been thinking back to the Vice Presidential Debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin last year, and the weird vibes I got from both candidates on the subject of gay marriage. Specifically there was Palin, who, with a confused tone, said: "...no one would ever propose, not in a McCain-Palin administration, to do anything to prohibit, say, visitations in a hospital or contracts being signed, negotiated between parties."
As I see it, this statement showed that Palin -- and, perhaps by extension, some portion of the GOP's voter base -- doesn't really understand what marriage legally entails. If a dying spouse's family objects to their unholy gay union in the first place, you can bet that spouse won't get to say goodbye, which is pretty heartbreaking; and even in the best circumstances, gay partners sometimes have to depend on empathetic hospital employees who are willing to break the rules at their own risk.
Meanwhile Biden said: "[neither] Barack Obama nor I support redefining from a civil side what constitutes marriage. We do not support that. That is basically the decision to be able to be able to be left to faiths and people who practice their faiths the determination what you call it."
Note that Biden did not say that this is a decision best left to the individual states; he said it's best left to the churches! Isn't there something a bit off about that? I mean, sure, I've been spouting off that marriage is an intrinsically religious institution for years, but I'm a fringe whackjob with a website. Joe Biden essentially said to all my married atheist friends, "you're affiliated with a church."
The problem with both of these views is that they fail to boil the debate down to its practical application. Palin, Biden, Republicans in general and Democrats in general get all hung up on semantics, as if it's more important how we define a word than how we apply the law. This is America, dammit, we're all supposed to be treated equally by our government -- at least in theory, if never in practice.
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