Marriage, Schmarriage

Indiana's efforts to constitutionally ban gay marriage are actually making headway this year. What it does, citizens of Indiana, is create the possibility that in 2008, you might be able to vote on whether or not we should put something in the Constitution that is already a law.

What you may not know is that marriage laws popped up in Indiana when the Ku Klux Klan ran the state, and they were created for the purpose of prohibiting interracial marriage. So what have we learned lessons from the past? We now know that 50 years ago, our state was run by racist bigots who used their power to oppress certain minorities. We now know that marriage laws should not have been used to keep people of different races from marrying, because it is discriminatory. We now know that the state's attempts to regulate marriage were based solely in a societal preference, to put it nicely. But wait...

It appears that we are right back where we started, with the legislature trying to legislate their preferences. But it is okay this time because the Bible says so. Well, guess what. The Bible prohibited interracial marriage 50 years ago. Now, have those passages been redacted or retranslated? Were they misinterpreted in the first place? Or did we realize that maybe, when it comes to secular government, the Bible should not be the final authority?

Not that this should even be a relevant part of the discussion. There is a separation of church and state in this country, so any legislation that is backed largely by a religious document should be considered unconstitutional.

So, it all comes down to one thing: equal protection under the law. The founding fathers wrote it to save us from our discriminating selves. Allow them to save us as a society. Do not permit the fundamentals of our country to be written over with hatred.