Iowa District Court Rules Gay Marriage Legal

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Originally Posted by Productivity

This logic falls down. If they have equal rights allready, ie. a gay man has every right to marry a woman, giving a gay man the right to marry another man does nothing to create more rights as a straight man can also then marry a man if he so chooses. The fact that the straight man would be unlikely to excercise that right does not man that he does not have that right, if you argue the same thing for gay men.

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All you're saying is that same sex marriage would not be discriminatory in itself. So long as being homosexual isn't a requirement, you'd be right. But saying same sex marriage is not discriminatory is not the same as saying that male/female marriage is discriminatory. This has been my point all along and why I feel the courts should stay out of the issue and allow it to be resolved in the political arena.

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Originally Posted by Xiahou

I feel the courts should stay out of the issue and allow it to be resolved in the political arena.

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This is a very valid point. Look at Roe v Wade -- a court imposed abortion rights on the entire nation, and we've been enduring the fallout ever since. I feel confident that if the abortion debate had been left in the political arena, we would have wound up with a reasonable compromise over time. No late-term abortions, counseling, expanded adoption efforts, and clean, legal help for first-trimester abortions.

Instead it was treated as a "right" by the courts, a one-size-fits-all solution was applied, and the subject has been a hot-flash of anger for much of the U.S. ever since. (I don't believe the extreme right would have gained so much power in this country if the Supreme Court had not imposed Roe v Wade, for what it's worth.)

Gay rights will progress, but they need to do so in the political arena, not the courts. This is not the moral equivalent of slavery, where we need to impose a unified solution with an army. (Note that many Southerners are still bitter about that as well.)

I'm all for gradualism.