Written by Joe Adgie

Allow us to paint a picture for you: two consenting adults love each other. They’ve loved each other for years, they’re faithful to each other and they decide that they want to get married. There’s nothing wrong with that. But what if the two adults are of the same gender?

For some, this is an unacceptable act. Some people claim that this marriage will undermine the institution of marriage – that the sanctity of marriage will be damaged by these two adults who have loved and been faithful to each other for years.

Give us a break.

If you sit down and think about it – and we mean really think about it – you’ll find that these two adults getting married won’t do anything to hurt the sanctity of marriage. These are two people that have decided that they want to spend the rest of their lives together. How does that threaten marriage? How does it cheapen it?

Others contend that these two adults getting married will undermine the traditional family.

Is this really likely? These two loving men or women being together will threaten the family unit more than the high-powered executive spending his days late at work doing God knows what with his secretary and leaving his wife after decades of marriage? These two loving men or women being together will threaten the family unit more than some scumbag sleeping around and having a dozen kids with a dozen women?

Frankly, if you really think two men or women getting married threatens your own marriage, maybe you should take a look in the mirror and see what’s wrong with your own relationship and not attack someone else’s life.

Having thought about it for a bit, we here at the Spectator do not really think our relationships will be threatened by this. If anything, it would be our own personal shortcomings that would threaten our relationships. It would be someone cheating on someone else. It would be someone turning out to be incompatible with someone else. It would be someone changing for the worse. These are all factors found within any relationship.

The constitutionality of The Defense of Marriage Act, as you know, is currently being discussed by the Supreme Court. DOMA prohibits same-sex couples from receiving the benefits that a heterosexual couple would normally get (see, for example, the benefits that were denied Tam O’Shaughnessy, the partner of Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, after Ride died in 2012), and this is hardly equal protection under the law.

It sounds a lot like the “Separate but Equal” language that saw segregation in many public services, such as schools. We learned then, as now, that separate but equal is a misnomer. The same exists for same-sex couples, who deserve the same rights that a heterosexual couple has.

It’s not going to hurt your relationship. It’s not going to undermine your marriage. If it does, that’s your problem, not everyone else’s.