Collegiate Times

This letter is in response to Kevin Gillispie's column, "Gay Marriage Does Not Accurately Depict Equality" (CT, April 28).

What may be most astounding about Kevin Gillispie's column on gay marriage and family structure is that, while inveighing against homosexuality, single-parent homes, and households with extended family, he never actually provides any legitimized study, statistic, or fact to back his rigid Regime of Truths. What is also surprising is how this author (like so many others against gay marriage and atypical family structures and relationships) hides behind a so-called objectivism that is no less Western than anti-gay views are derived from strictly Judeo-Christian values. Michel Foucault would have a field day.

If we were to use Rush Limbaugh as the spokesman for the conservatives, just as Gillispie has arbitrarily elected Perez Hilton as Exemplar-In-Chief for the gay community, we would be forced to wonder how someone who has been through three divorces could discuss the sanctity of marriage seriously. This is the usual conservative line of thinking - proclaimed objectivism while subjectively charging their arguments and accusing liberals of being too emotional.

The attack is not just on gay couples as it may seem - it's also on single parent households and all other families that do not fit rightly into the one-father-married-to-one-mother, heterosexual norm. This is not surprising when we examine America's history of family standards. Not long ago it was expected that you married within your race and religion and that anything outside of this was both socially unacceptable and ungodly. Had we kept to these rigid parameters our current president, raised by a single woman and grandparents in a biracial household, would never have come to be.

Another interesting point in this column is Gillispie's comment on polygamy. According to his column, polygamy at least has "historical precedence;" this obfuscates the centuries of embraced gay unions and relationships found among cultures on all but one continent before the extension of Christendom.

In the latter half of the column Gillispie feigns recognition that access to opportunities and resources is not equally distributed and that some people deserve access to these resources more than others. Yet, at the same time, he neglects to recognize that marriage has become a social and legal institution in this country, granted to both the religious and non-religious indiscriminately, bestowing anything from joint custody of children to benefits of annuities, pensions, Social Security and Medicare. According to Religioustolerance.org, there are, in fact, 400 state benefits associated with marriage and more than 1,000 federal benefits. The real core of the gay marriage argument is simply that there is more to marriage than the religious context and that if people wish to maintain its exclusivity then they are going to have to do one of two things to be consistent: they will either have to give up the social and legal benefits that come attached to it and make it a strictly religious affair or they will have to allow civil unions to gay couples which grant all the same legal and social rights.

Anita Nankam, sophomore, biochemistry

John Driessnack, sophomore, biology