Let’s Talk About Gay Marriage

Georgia is a conservative state; I get it. There is very little conservative Georgians love more than telling other people how they “ought” to live. It’s fun to have a lot of good advice for sharing. Giving advice is what I do for a living. Outside of the immediate Atlanta area, Georgians are largely opposed to recognizing marriage between two homosexual consenting adults. That’s fine. Part of tolerance involves tolerating others’ intolerance.

Like or not, gay couples are getting married all over the country and bringing their gay-marriedness back to Georgia. We have gay, legally married couples already living among us. As a divorce lawyer, I am just hoping that this influx of married gay couples has the promised effect of further eroding the establishment of marriage. (That just sounds awful, doesn’t it?)

But, let’s be serious for a moment because this is an issue we need to really think about, not as right-wingers or left-wingers or moderates or agnostics or what-have-you, but as people. These are families being created and raised in our state. Just like married couples, unmarried couples, and casual hookups, “these people” sometimes have children. Sometimes they buy property together. Sometimes they suffer domestic abuse (crimes). They have legitimate legal problems just like the rest of us. This is how we need to think about this “issue.”

Why should the child of a homosexual couple not be entitled to the same considerations and protections of children born to married, heterosexual parents? Georgia law currently prohibits treating same-sex couples as if they were married and seeking a typical, legal divorce. If a partner in a same-sex relationship stays home and raises the couples’ child while the other partner works, why shouldn’t that stay-at-home-parent have some rights to the working spouse’s 401k?

We need to broaden the discussion when talking about the issue of gay marriage. It’s much bigger and more important than whether we, as a state, allow two gay people to “break up” more simply than traditional married couples. We, as Georgians, have said that the creation and support of families and children is important to us. If it is indeed so important to us, then this issue and its legal ramifications and the legal protections afforded by marriage ought to be important to us as well.