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Political Issues of Same-Sex Marriage Essay

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Political Issues of Same-Sex Marriage

The political aspects of whether same-sex couples should be allowed to federal and government recognized marriages are a very complex issue. There are basically two sides to the political argument of whether same-sex couples should be allowed to marry. On one side are the liberals who feel that marriage is a civil right that should be denied based on the basis of a person's sexual orientation. On the other side you have conservatives who feel that marriage is an institution in which should only constitute one man and one woman. In this report we are going to examine how the issue of same-sex marriages are affecting our current political environment, how politics is affecting the movement for …show more content…

In order to get a better hold of how the issue of same-sex marriage would affect politics, we will take a look at the current and proposed legislature that is shaping the political atmosphere of this issue. We will start with current state and federal legislature that is affecting the issue. The current major state and federal law that is affecting same-sex marriage is the Defense of Marriage Act , or DOMA as it also called. The Defense of Marriage Act is a federal law that allows each state to recognize or deny any marriage-like relationship between persons of the same-sex that has been recognized in another state and it also explicitly recognizes for purposes of federal law that marriage is "a legal union of one man and one woman as husband and wife" and by stating that spouse "refers only to a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or wife." When asking the people that I interviewed what their feelings were towards the Defense of Marriage Act and how it currently affects the issue of same-sex marriage and the interviewees who were for same-sex marriage felt that the law was inherently wrong and the person I interviewed who was opposed to same-sex marriage thought the law was good except for one obvious flaw with it. The problem that she was referring to was the fact that the Defense of Marriage Act gives one state the right to not acknowledge a marriage from another state. This could be considered unconstitutional according to

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