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W0416550
W0416550
3 May 2012
All You Need is Love
Introduction
Should gay marriage be legalized? In the United States, there is social unrest regarding
the issue of legalizing same-sex marriage. All in all, the American government is clearly
undecided on the issue of granting same-sex couples the right to marry. Several politicians are
using religious arguments to establish that homosexuality is morally deviant. While there may be
many conflicting belief systems, the United States of America was founded on the idea of
religious freedom, which means that people are allowed to worship how and where they see fit.
Separation of church and state has been a ground rule set from the very beginning, as to avoid
another theocracy. With the issue of same-sex marriage, the lines of equality become blurred,
allowing religion to rear its nasty head to influence a government’s decision of who shall be
granted to right of marriage.
Background
Homosexuality has been on the increase for over a thousand years. Always kept closely
under wraps and out of the public eye, the idea of homosexual relations today is becoming less
and less a topic to blush about. In fact, before the rise of the Christian and Jewish faiths,
homosexual relationships were something of a social norm. The first recorded evidence of
homosexual relationships appeared in several ancient Egyptian texts. Not only was this an
accepted practice
in Egypt but also in the Roman, French, and English empires as well. But because of the
powerful Catholic religious view that being gay is immoral and an abomination, homosexuality
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W0416550
has long since carried the stigma of embarrassment and shame. Prior to 1962, sodomy was a
felony in every state, punishable by a term of imprisonment and/or hard labor. The harshest of
penalties was in Idaho, where a person convicted of sodomy could earn a life sentence. In the
2002-2003 case of Lawrence et al vs. Texas, two homosexuals in a Houston apartment were
arrested by police for performing a homosexual act and fined $200 because of the Texas anti-
sodomy law (“The War Over Gay Marriage” ). Moreover, as an effect of this case the U.S.
Supreme Court ruled that gays were entitled to a right of privacy, invalidating all anti-sodomy
laws in the remaining fourteen states as consequence. These cases bore great importance to the
gay community, by opening the floodgates of further recognition for gay rights to the supreme
courts.
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