MoonCrone Musings II

Greetings!

Welcome once again to my writing of MoonCrone's Musings. It is my humble offering to you in Spirit. I write here about topics of interest to me. I hope they may be of interest and use to you.

Please feel free to pass this to friends as long as you keep the copyright attached.

Would You Like a DNA Test with That Marriage License?

Gay and Lesbian same-sex marriage is in all the news lately. President Bush has come out in favor of the Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would define marriage as a union between one man and one woman that was originally proposed by Colorado Senator Marilyn Musgrave.

Gay and Lesbian couples have lined the courthouse in San Francisco this week to take advantage of the offer of marriage licenses and nuptials by the new Mayor of San Francisco Gavin Newsome. Rosie O'Donnell and her partner Kelly flew in to take part in the weddings and to protest President Bush's stance.

While I personally don't see marriage as crucial, I know for those Gay and Lesbian couples with children, or with non-supportive families, the emphasis on obtaining a legal state of marriage is very important. How terrifying to be in the situation that Karen Thompson and Sharon Kawolski faced. One partner, Sharon, was severely disabled by a drunken driver smashing into her car and lay incapacitated in the hospital. The other partner, Karen, was not even allowed to visit since she was not "family." They had no legal ties to one another. The family of the disabled woman, Sharon, took over her life shutting Karen completely out. Karen started on a lengthy court battle spanning many years that ultimately won her the right to see her beloved.

Gay and Lesbian couples want the right to have legal connection to one another. For whatever reason, seeing each other despite disapproving families, having their own children with one another, sharing benefits including Social Security, rights that others take for granted.

But the road to Gay and Lesbian marriage isn't as straight as is assumed. Let's look more closely at this Federal Marriage Amendment wording of "one man and one woman."

Within the Gay and Lesbian community is also the Transgendered community. You are familiar with such persons as "sex-change" recipients. Christine Jorgensen was one of the first and most famous. These persons are changed into the opposite sex. But their DNA remains the same. So, while the primary sex indicators are for one gender, the DNA says different. They are issued a new birth certificate for the new gender assignment.

The Federal Marriage Amendment would allow these persons to get married as long as one was a man and one was a woman. I assume the court clerk wouldn't be checking in anyone's underwear!

So, if persons who have had their gender reassigned can be legally thought of as the other gender while retaining the cellular structure of the former gender...readers, my head is spinning! I can't quite see the problem with making the leap from marriage unions with Transgendered persons being legal to same-sex unions being legal.

Just this evening on Dateline NBC there are stories of loving married couples, man and woman, one of whom decides to become another gender. These couples often stay together after the surgery, becoming a same-sex couple. Are they married? The transgendered person still has the DNA they had before surgery, the DNA they had when they originally married as man and woman. According to the story, these marriages are still valid, even though the newly gendered person has a new birth certificate. If these same-sex marriages are valid, it seems a small leap to allow the same-sex marriage that Gays and Lesbians seek.

And in more rare cases children are born with the genitals of two genders. They are often surgically assigned a gender based on which genitals are more prominent. This has been the case in the past. Often, the gender assignment did not fit the DNA, yet these people grew up as the gender that they had been assigned. So they are much like Transgendered persons. I assume that no one checked their DNA when they married.

Does President Bush even begin to fathom the complexities of instituting such an Amendment to the Constitution? Would there ever be DNA tests at the altar? I might be foretelling the future, I certainly hope not.

What I do hope is that the courts win. Marriage is firstly a legal institution, a religious institution secondly. Couples go to the state for divorce, even if they were married in a church. Given that we have separation of church and state as a standing part of our Constitution, no one section of American people should be able to tell the courts what is legal based on religious viewpoints. Neither should the people be allowed to decide this question. It took years for women to get the vote because popular opinion was that they were incapable of voting. The people, although the voice of democracy, must often be educated into using their voices well. And the government should follow the Constitution as it stands, separation of church and state.

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MoonCrone's Musings Vol. I, issue 2
copyright 2004 Louise Chambers