"Gays Keep Separated, Church and State Not"

I ran across this op-ed in the Chicago Tribune written by Geoffrey A. Stone, a law professor at the University of Chicago who had a very personal take on same-sex marriage. He has watched his daughter Mollie settle into a very happy long-term relationship with another woman who she cannot legally marry.

He writes about previous restrictions on marriage:

"The institution of marriage has embodied many restrictions over the years since St. Paul. Marriage has been prohibited, for example, to people of different religions and different races. Like the ban on same-sex marriage, those prohibitions were justified by appeals to tradition, natural law and Scripture. In a representative statement, a judge explained miscegenation laws: "Almighty God created the races, white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix."

Mr. Stone closes with this thought:

"At least with respect to same-sex marriage, our society is about to change. A third of Americans now favor allowing same-sex marriage, and more than half now support same-sex civil commitment. Our nation's greatest achievement has been its ability to recognize and overcome deeply entrenched racial, religious, gender and ethnic discrimination. We will achieve this as well in the realm of sexual orientation. But some of us grow impatient. I'd like to go to Mollie's wedding."

I hope he gets his wish sooner rather than later.