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Analysis of Andrew Sullivan´s Article: "Let Gays Marry"

Decent Essays

Gay Marriage is not Equal Rights In his essay, “Let Gays Marry,” Andrew Sullivan advocates gay marriage. He argues that gay couples ought to be able to marry because as citizens, they deserve equal rights. He claims that disallowing gays to marry each other would make them strangers in their own country. However, his argument is invalid as it seeks to impose the broad definition of equality on the narrower, but unrelated issue of marriage. Just because gays have equal rights as citizens, doesn’t mean they have the right to marry each other, because homosexual marriage cannot fulfill the biological, sociological, or civil aims of marriage. Sullivan starts by quoting the Supreme Court’s declaration that “[a] state cannot deem a class of persons a stranger to its laws” (83), demonstrating that gays and lesbians are entitled to equal rights with other people. He is absolutely right. Gays and lesbians, as citizens, should have equal rights. They do have equal rights. But Sullivan makes a “radical proposal” (Sullivan 83) on the issue. He concludes that, because gays are equal in the view of the law, they should be allowed to marry. True, gays and non-gays are equal under the law. However, individual freedoms are very different from the proposition of gay marriage. When looked at objectively, gays have no less rights then non-gays. Moreover, the equality we have is judicial, not biological. Homosexual relationships lack the biological conditions required by nature for marriage,

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