Thursday, April 24, 2008
In the article “What is Marriage?” by Evan Wolfson, Wolfson essentially compares marriage between a gay couple and convicted felons. Wolfson does this because he is making the point that prisoners have the right to get married but a homosexual couple does not. By putting homosexuals in the same category as prisoners Wolfson is forcing his readers to consider the extremity of banning gay marriage. I thought this was an incredibly effective rhetorical strategy because it shows the fault of our system so prevalently. It cannot get much clearer than prisoners can marry but gay people cannot. I think this example of how far our government has gone to keep gay marriage illegal is relevant because it shows a great comparison of how skewed our government is.
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While i can see your point of view, I don't think that his metaphor was effective. I'm not sure that you can compare two totally different circumstances through the same lens. It kind of runs into the apple v. oranges problem. With the prisoners, one has to decide wether commiting a crime is enough reason to take the right to marry away. What about if they were married before they were incarcerated? does that mean that marriage before doesn't still stand?
However, with the same sex marriage debate, it's a totally different issue. Marriage in America has always been between a male and a female and has strong religious connections with a lot of people. This isn't just deciding whether or not someone can wed someone else, this is changing the institution as a whole a way that a good chunk of the population wouldn't appreciate. The two issues really don't relate, and trying to lump them as a whole just doesn't compute well with me
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