Us Fears Over Gay Weddings
The Age
Saturday March 30, 1996
Washington, Friday.
It is election time in America and all around the nation, politicians are busily working to protect voters from that cradle of wanton lechery, Hawaii.
At issue is gay marriages, something voters rarely cite as an even remotely pressing concern. But with Hawaii's courts poised to rule same-sex marriages legal, perhaps as early as this August, conservative activists have goaded their political representatives in more than 20 states to fight against the spread of such licentiousness.
Under the American Constitution, each state is supposed to give ``full faith and credit" to the laws of every other state.
So if Hawaii does sanction homosexual marriages, as is widely expected, the rest of the country would have to award any gays who tied the knot in that state the rights of inheritance and child custody.
Conservative activists in Utah and South Dakota have already successfully pushed for the passage of laws banning homosexual marriage. Polls show voters opposed to same-sex marriage by at least 2-1, at least 20 other states have begun action on the issue, with more expected to do so before the end of the year.
The issue has also seeped into the presidential election campaign. When Christian conservatives in Iowa held a huge rally to protest against the Hawaiian threat, the presumptive Republican nominee, Senator Bob Dole, readily signed their ``Marriage Protection Resolution".
One of those leading the charge against homosexual marriages is the Reverend Lou Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition in California.
``It's just unthinkable," he said. ``You would have the breakdown of civilisation." Homosexuals who married would still have ``their wild and crazy sex", he said, even though ``their body parts just don't fit, and it messes with everything".
Such rhetoric did not deter Colorado's Democrat Governor, Roy Romer, from vetoing a ban on same-sex marriages which passed through his state legislature this week. But anti-gay legislators in the Rocky Mountain state are determined to press on. Colorado is a hotbed of anti-gay activism and feelings against Hawaii are running high there. Already some are calling for a boycott of Hawaii's most lucrative industry, tourism.
But at least one stronghold of American gay activism, San Francisco, is fighting back with vigor, if only symbolically.
The city has passed its own ordinance sanctioning homosexual marriages, and even though it carries no weight in the rest of California, it was the cause of much celebration when more than 200 homosexual couples were pronounced ``domestic partners" in the country's first mass marriage ceremony.
One influential religious group has lent its weight to those opposed to the bans on homosexual marriages. The 1750 members of the Central Conference of American Rabbis voted overwhelmingly to endorse the legalisation of same-sex marriages.
© 1996 The Age
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