The debate over gay marriage

It’s “the civil-rights issue of our time,” said the Financial Times. As the U.S. Supreme Court considers two landmark cases on gay marriage, the tide of history is clearly moving toward legalization. Unfortunately, the justices appear wary of issuing an expansive decision and sparking “another U.S. culture war over states’ rights,” as they did with their 1973 ruling legalizing abortion in Roe v. Wade. But it would be a mistake to leave states “to their own devices” on this issue. “Either there is a constitutional right to equal treatment or there is not.” The U.S. is a vast and diverse country, said Martin Klingst in Die Zeit (Germany), and it has always proudly defended the idea that what’s allowed in liberal states like Massachusetts does not have to be permitted in places like Alabama. But occasionally such diversity “also means great injustice.” A gay couple with an adopted child should not find their marriage invalid simply because they move from New York to Virginia. If gay marriage really is a fundamental civil right, then it must be granted everywhere “without exception.”

Mexico is already heading in that direction, said Patricia Briseño in Excelsior (Mexico). In December, our Supreme Court declared unconstitutional a law banning gay marriage in the southern state of Oaxaca. The justices here even cited two U.S. Supreme Court cases in their decision, comparing the inability of gays to marry to the discrimination interracial couples once faced north of the border. Last month, for the first time, a gay couple was wed in Oaxaca. Their marriage “is a triumph of democracy, equality, and non-discrimination,” even if the laws in all of Mexico’s states still need to be aligned with our Supreme Court’s ruling.

“The wily framers of the Indian constitution were thinking way ahead,” said Sandip Roy in FirstPost.com. Actually, our marriage laws are gender neutral only because “they just didn’t imagine” anything but heterosexual marriage. When the time comes, we won’t have to fight the battle that’s now before the U.S. Supreme Court, but we’re a long way from that: India still has a law criminalizing “sex against the order of nature.” We’re no more settled on gay marriage here in France, said Ivan Rioufol in LeFigaro.fr. A bill legalizing gay marriage and the right of gay couples to adopt is moving through our parliament, but many French citizens remain staunchly opposed, concerned that the institutions of marriage and family will be irreparably harmed in the name of political opportunism. However dismissive our media have been of this energetic opposition movement, something akin to a “French Spring” is blossoming. Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators marched through Paris last month, committed to defending France’s “culture, its values, its way of life.”

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March to your heart’s content, said The Age (Australia) in an editorial. But let’s get one thing straight: Gay marriage is inevitable, in the U.S. and elsewhere in the developed world. Those who continue to ignore this truth not only pit themselves against “overwhelming common sense,” they “risk being morally marginalized and globally isolated.” Gay marriage “is part of a modern world. It will happen, so why not soon?”