Tuesday, February 24, 2004

Elected Official
Their address in
Washington DC

Dear Elected Official,

SUBJECT: MARRIAGE

This is to address the rather erroneous idea that marriage in the United States of America 
needs defending. The United States uses the word marriage to define two different things. I 
believe that understanding those, and the differences between them, may help people understand 
why marriage is not threatened.

First, marriage is a spiritual union between people who wish to bond themselves together in the 
eyes of their Deity. Every day in this country, people commit to each other in religious ceremonies; 
most are legal but some are not. It is important to note those who undergo rites of commitment 
without the legal support. They are undergoing their ritual purely for the spiritual bond. These 
rituals occur wherever the participants feel most Holy. This ideal of marriage is not under threat. 
In fact, many of the people who flocked to San Francisco in the 2 weeks, had probably already 
undergone similar religious ceremonies.

However, there is more to marriage in the United States than spirituality. Marriage has a very 
distinct legal aspect, and includes Social Security benefits, Taxation benefits, Immigration and 
Naturalization, as well as various statutory provisions. From this point of view, marriage is very 
much a legal contract, regardless of the spirituality involved in the relationship. People have 
been entering into marriage contracts for purely financial and legal purposes since its inception. 
Preventing people from entering marriage contracts purely based on their sexual orientation, will 
not prevent people from taking advantage of the legal benefits of marriage. It will only prevent 
people who love each other enough to spend their lives together from experiencing the legal benefits 
of marriage. Is this truly what freedom in the United States of America means?

Adding an amendment to the United States Constitution declaring that marriage is a contract that 
can only be entered into by members of the opposite sex, would be a devastating blow to civil 
freedoms for all citizens of the United States of America. Previously in the history of the United 
States, there have been gaps in how some people were treated. However, the second-class citizens of 
yesterday were the product of irrational prejudice and, in some cases, prejudice brought in from 
other countries. We learned, sometimes the hard way, that the prejudice was ill founded and rewrote 
the laws of the country to reflect that, reinforcing that the Freedom of the United States, is not 
an arbitrary thing. By allowing this amendment to pass, you would be telling, not only the 
homosexual citizens of this country that they are second-class citizens, but that every minority in 
this country could be in that class again. Is that a message you want the world to hear? Is it a 
message you want the children of tomorrow to read in their history books? I can only hope not.


Respectfully,

Helen Elizabeth Vickers