Gay Marriage Research Paper

The United States’ Declaration of Independence reads, “[We] hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” and Abraham Lincoln in his Gettysburg Address furthers, “[the] [United States’] fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” But in the United States today, not all are equal. Within the majority of the United States, same-sex couples cannot be married or reap the benefits of said marriage. Marriage is basic to the recognition as equals in society and any status short of this becomes …show more content…
Human beings have always given traditional marriage a special sanction.... Are we so wise today that we are ready to reject 5,000 years of recorded history? I do not think so.”
This "special sanction" to marriage defined as a legal union between one man and one woman is simply untrue. Firstly, polygamy has very strong biblical historical credentials. “Jacob, son of Isaac, married two wives, Leah and Rachel, and had children through them and their handmaids. Solomon had seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines (granted this was considered a sin, but because the wives were foreign, not because they were so many). Muslims from the time of Mohammed to the present allow men to marry more than one wife” (Walen 4).
And even in Tibet, some women marry two or more men. Secondly, same-sex unions were an integral part of the cultures of classical Greece and republican Rome, and imperial Rome recognized same-sex marriages. “During the Middle Ages the Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches celebrated same-sex unions, as did imperial China.... Marriages in the so-called berdache tradition of gender-crossing effeminate men and 'amazon' women have been documented for dozens of other cultures in Africa, Australia, and Asia” (Eskridge 55). Others argue, like republican representative Asa Hutchinson, that "[m]arriage is a covenant established by God wherein one man and one

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