Martin Luther King

Martin Luther King

Introduction

Martin Luther King, Jr., (January 15, 1929-April 4, 1968) was born Michael Luther King, Jr., but later had his name changed to Martin. His grandfather began the family's long tenure as pastors of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, serving from 1914 to 1931; his father has served from then until the present, and from 1960 until his death Martin Luther acted as co-pastor. Martin Luther attended segregated public schools in Georgia, graduating from high school at the age of fifteen; he received the B. A. degree in 1948 from Morehouse College, a distinguished Negro institution of Atlanta from which both his father and grandfather had graduated.

Many politicians are equating legal rights for homosexuals with the black struggle against racism. This is not a valid argument. There is a specter haunting America. It is the movement to promote and legalize homosexual marriage. The movement has adopted a cunning political strategy to appeal to everyone from the suburban soccer mom to the urban white-male liberal: It has packaged its demand for the radical redefining of marriage in the rhetoric and imagery of the U.S. civil rights movement.

Discussion

Fundamentally, the debate gets murky. Not too long ago, Thomas Sowell wrote an article called 'Gay Marriage' confusions, in which he points out the holes in the arguments being made by gay rights activists. Sowell wisely notes:

Few issues have produced as much confused thinking as the "gay marriage" issue.

There is, for example, the argument that the government has no business getting involved with marriage in the first place. That is a personal relation, the argument goes.

Love affairs are personal relations. Marriage is a legal relation. To say that government should not get involved in legal relations is to say that government has no business governing. Homosexuals were on their strongest ground when they said that what happens between "consenting adults" in private is none of the government's business. But now gay activists are taking the opposite view, that it is government's business -- and that government has an obligation to give its approval.

The last refuge of the gay marriage advocates is that this is an issue of equal rights. But marriage is not an individual right. Otherwise, why limit marriage to unions of two people instead of three or four or five?

Why limit it to adult humans, if some want to be united with others of various ages, sexes and species? Marriage is a social contract because the issues involved go beyond the particular individuals. Unions of a man and a woman produce the future generations on whom the fate of the whole society depends. Society has something to say about that.

Even at the individual level, men and women have different circumstances, if only from the fact that women have babies and men do not. These and other asymmetries in the positions of women and men justify long-term legal arrangements to enable society to keep this asymmetrical relationship viable -- for society's sake.

But the partisans of homosexual marriage have a ...