I'll take some pragmatism with my change, please!

Well, hello there blog reader! It's been a while... 4 months and 5 days to be exact. For that, allow me to apologize; the blog fell into a coinciding disrepair with all of our bloggers. Chris, Marco, Chelsea and I were busy preparing for AP exams, and with the end of the year pressures that go along with Senior year, none of us were particularly filled with energy or able to make posts any more. As summer began our project was forgotten, although in pretty much every conversation I've had with them (and I talk to Marco daily) the idea to restart the blog has been included. To do justice to that, I'll bat lead off once again.

Since our effort went into a hiatus, we have had a whole host of political stuff happen; gas climbed to over 4 dollars a gallon (the price of oil spiked to over $140 a barrel), Barack Obama and John McCain gained their respective party's presumptive nomination, the home mortgage crisis has pretty much drowned our already flailing economy and brought us dangerously close to a categorical recession, and the Supreme Court made a number of landmark decisions. Those issues and topics will be covered in the days and weeks ahead in our best possible detail, but my actual post has to deal with something that has inspired me personally to resuscitate the blog: the issue of "pragmatism."

Now, you're definitely cursing my "big vocabulary" and wondering exactly what pragmatism is. A dictionary.com definition of pragmatism: "a philosophical movement or system having various forms, but generally stressing practical consequences as constituting the essential criterion in determining meaning, truth, or value."

Okay, so now that the definition is cleared up for three of you, I'll explain the meaning of the definition applied to my posts for the rest of you. Pragmatism is the philosophy of practicality; that is, any solution to a problem should serve practical interests, and more specifically this series of posts will attempt to reconcile issues on both sides of the political spectrum with a practical solution for both sides. More specifically, this series of posts should be labeled "reconciled pragmatism" but that doesn't exactly do poetic justice, now does it?

Okay, and one more thing before I get into serious detail with this post. When you're reading these posts, please do read them from the first word to the last word without skipping parts you don't want to read. I'll be bashing and praising parts of both sides of any given issue, so if your well reasoned (and hijacked) argument is offended, please grind through it and hear me all the way out. So, without further adieu, I present the first in my series of "pragmatic" posts. The issue at hand is gay marriage.

First things first, why gay marriage? Well, recently this issue has been pressed to the top of the headlines on news websites and newspapers, and considering the point of this blog is to focus our youthful votes on issues that actually require deep thought and debate (economics, warfare and foreign policy, energy), the fact that gay marriage is being given our time has some importance for both moral figures and gays themselves, but the fact is that the vast majority of society could care less. That doesn't mean that this issue has no importance; basic facts about the issue state otherwise, but it is no doubt a second-hand issue when energy needs are slaughtering our economy while we're dumping $341 million dollars per day into Iraq.

So, we've established that gay marriage is an (although second-hand) issue that needs solving without (in my opinion) a great national debate.

The Right Wing's Opinion:
Yes, fiscal conservatives, I realize that the Christian Right does not speak for you, but for purposes of expediency we're going to lump you all into one category. (That applies to you, too, Catholic liberals.) Generally speaking, the right's moral argument on gay marriage says something like this: because 5,000 years of human tradition, from Lucy to the most recent religiously sanctioned marriages. establishes that the definition of marriage is one man plus one woman equals marriage, and that gays are trying to redefine the traditional and... basically logical definition of marriage. Okay, to this I say yes, yes yes yes. This is both reasoned, researched, and basically irrefutable. Morally. There is not and will never be a moral argument in favor of gay marriage that you will hear me or any other honest moralist make, because that argument simply does not exist. The part of the right's argument that I do not agree with is a ban on a national piece of policy that regulates "gay marriage" (or what I will refer to in this paragraph and later on in detail as a "union"). Sorry guys, you tried that one already. The battle over the legality of interracial marriage has a myriad of parallels to the current battle over the legality of same-sex marriage. "Each [person] has the right and the privilege of marrying withing his or her own group." This argument could easily be substituted for gays, to something like "Each gay can marry, legally, in any state to someone of the opposite gender." The first (incidentally quoted from the Justice Shenk's dissenting opinion in the 1948 California Supreme Court case, Perez v. Lippold) is from a the California case that overturned California's ban on interracial marriage in 1948. The second (which I invented) is a standard yet flimsy civil argument against gay marriage. With that presented, I will move on to the left's argument

The Left's Argument:
The left's typical civil (or legal) argument speaks as something like this: because marriage is an institution tied to insurance claims, emergency room visits, and other property issues, the fact that gays couples are denied equal access to the institution of marriage is an infringement of their equal protection under the laws (the "due process clause" spelled out in the Fourteenth Amendment). To this I say yes, yes yes yes. Again, this is both reasoned, researched, and definitely irrefutable. The fact that gays can be together for decades without equal protection under the law as citizens is a serious injustice and breach of our Constitutional protection for all citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment. Further, the leftist argument spells out that a "civil union" is also unconstitutional, citing Brown v. Board as evidence of this. How could a civil rights case possibly apply to gay marriage? Well, Brown's majority opinion states that a "separate" institution (that is, civil union for marriage) is "inherently unequal." Again, yes yes yes. Without getting into too much detail, civil unions only confer local or state benefits at best and have no weight in federal law, making them legally speaking nothing more than a note on a page. What this means is, for example, Tom and Bob might have a legal civil union in Connecticut, but if Tom commits a federal offense, Bob can be forced to testify against him in federal court, whereas if they were married under the law they could not be forced to testify against each other. However, gays get this issue wrong on one major point: by calling it "marriage," they are fighting an uphill battle. The word marriage evokes one image for most people, religious marriage. The problem is that "most people" can also be defined as "most of the electorate" so fear tactics about the "preservation of marriage" are laughably easy to use in order to detract from gay marriage reform attempts. However, the right wing on this issue is totally focused on protection of religious marriage, not civil marriage. Sometimes I wonder if the strongest advocates of a prohibition on gay marriage even realize that. In any case, in the defense of religious marriage they are correct, religious marriage is a moral issue and therefore worth protecting.

Reconciliation:
Okay, so I have presented why the right is correct to protect the religious institution of marriage, and why the left is correct to assault the civil institution of marriage. My reconciliation on this issue comes in several forms. The first is that a federal piece of policy, whether it be an executive order, a law passed by Congress, or a Supreme Court decision, must be enacted which removes the word "marriage" from federal and state statutes that apply to marriage. The fact that marriage was written into our laws in the first place is a violation of the first clause of the First Amendment; "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." This is called the "exercise clause" and can be applied to this very issue in an active way. My belief on the practicality (pragmatism!) of this argument is simple: we required schools to desegregate with Brown, and I think with a new piece of policy we can require secretaries to edit "marriage" out of statutes and replace it with "union." Further, the definition of the term "union" is afforded to the states, so folks concerned about too much federal power are satisfied, and a de facto check to the states abridging gay unions is that anything that abridges same-sex marriage must also abridge straight marriages. Alas, by simply rewording the idea within the law, you detach all religious stigma from the issue and make it a simple civil issue. The second form of reconciliation is contained in the second clause of the First Amendment, "or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." Religious marriage survives and is defended against a precedent less and illogical redefinition of the institution, while preserving the legal rights of gays. A side-benefit for moralists (at least in my view) comes in a different, sort of twisted way. For religious couples to claim they are married, as they most certainly will want to, they must attend their religious services and by doing so in fact strengthen religious ties in America! While this solution might lend itself to a bit too many practical benefits, I submit that it is the best solution available.

There, is basically, my exhaustive and detailed argument in reconciliation of the issue of gay marriage. For a quick and easy summary: Detractors of gay marriage are trying to defend religious marriage from intrusion by gay couples, and supporters are trying to receive equal protection under the laws guaranteed to them in the Constitution. To solve this problem, we redefine the legal definition of marriage as the states see fit, and the new definition must be termed "union". Also, states continue to recognize religious marriage, however religious marriage contains no special legal rights compared to a "union."

The fact is that we must recognize religious heritage while also recognizing common rights of all citizens. Both sides of this issue can be reconciled.

I appreciate any and all arguments against this post, as the free exchange of ideas is key to improving my own argument and changing any views I have presented here.

Pragmatic?

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Phew. That was exhaustive. If you even got to this point, thank you. The comment button is below, use it! Idea exchange and questions are both seriously desired :)

PS, the blog hiatus at least worked for our blog authors; all four of us received fives on the AP Gov exam.

PPS, a quick google search for "civil argument gay marriage" yielded several articles; three of the top articles look dangerously similar to mine. I would like to note for the record that I share the ideas of these articles and no idea is original any more but I did not straight up steal any of the material posted in this post. This was a more pragmatic solution that I had envisioned in some discussion with good ol' Jillian on the topic at issue here. I just didn't write it down first!

Quick Bibliography:
http://www.nclrights.org/site/DocServer/marriage_equality0905.pdf?docID=881
http://www.brownat50.org/brownCases/PreBrownCases/PerezvLippoldCal1948.html
Also, the US Constitution was referenced in physical form for the First and Fourteenth Amendments.