The Heart of the California Marriage Case Is.....

the definition of marriage. That's the takeaway from this article in the New York Times.

For almost four hours on Tuesday, the California Supreme Court heard arguments in the most important same-sex marriage case since Massachusetts’s highest court allowed gay and lesbian couples to marry there more than four years ago.

But it took only 15 minutes for Justice Carlos R. Moreno to identify the central question. “Doesn’t this just boil down to the use of the m-word — marriage?” he asked.

California has a domestic partnership law that gives gay and lesbian couples nearly all of the legal rights and responsibilities that come with heterosexual marriage. That leaves open the question posed by Justice Moreno, one freighted with history, symbolism and emotion: What is so special about marriage?

Lawyers for the same-sex couples seeking the right to marry said that marriage was a unique expression of love and commitment and that calling their unions anything else was a form of second-class citizenship.

Lawyers for groups opposed to same-sex marriage agreed that marriage was a fundamental bond with ancient roots, but they drew the opposite conclusion, saying that allowing same-sex couples to marry would undermine the institution of marriage itself.

I thought these few paragraphs summed the whole issue up just about as well as I've seen it.

Is there any real reason beyond forcing people to change the tradition of who can get married to require couples of the same-sex to essentially establish their own subculture in order to gain some, usually not all, of the rights afforded heterosexual couples?

I can't think of any.

"We've always done it this way" continues to be one of the worst reasons to continue a practice or policy. There were a lot of things done in previous generations that would seem inconceivable now, but they were deeply ingrained traditions back in the day.

Hopefully, future generations will be able to add the prohibition of same-sex marriage to that list.