[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Constitutional Amendment to ban Gay Marriage
Marriage promotes a variety of individual and state interests, whether the marital couple is composed of individuals of the same or opposite sex. Arguably, state legislatures should pass legislation to extend legal recognition to gay unions as a matter of good public policy, although that seems unlikely in the near future. In the short term, gay marriage rights will most likely be accorded as a result of a court's recognizing that they are protected by state or federal constitutional guarantees.
Gay marriage opponents offer a variety of specious arguments in their attempts to establish that there is no constitutional right to marry a gay partner. For example, some commentators argue that if a state is constitutionally required to recognize gay marriages, then that state would also be constitutionally required to recognize incestuous and polygamous marriages and, further, would be constitutionally precluded from passing adultery and sodomy laws. Yet, these claims are specious. The harms that are implicated in incestuous and polygamous marriages simply are not present in gay marriages, which involve only two individuals who are not members of the same family.
Adulterous relationships and gay unions are disanalogous in a constitutionally significant respect, since the protection of the former would tend to undermine families while the recognition of the latter would tend to strengthen them. Those arguing that sodomy laws would somehow be invalidated if gay marriages were recognized seem to forget that most sodomy laws are not restricted to samesex sodomy. Just as there is a marital exception to sodomy laws for opposite-sex married couples, there would be a marital exception to such laws for gay married couples. Were gay unions legally recognized, the couples would be protected by an existing exception and thus the invalidation of all sodomy laws would not be required. Although sodomy laws are probably unconstitutional because they violate the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States......
