Gay Marriage

In writing this, I suppose I should make it clear first that I am a Christian. However, that doesn’t actually change my view on the situation much. Essentially, I believe that gay marriage – or gay civil partnerships, as it is more accurate to call them, should be made legal.
Firstly, what I think people need to realise about the gay marriage issue is what a legal marriage is. Legal marriage is not Christian marriage. Barack Obama correctly pointed out that it is impossible for a gay couple to be married. Marriage, or at least Christian marriage, is a religious concept, and thus being married depends on the rules according to that religion. So what is a legal marriage? Legal marriage is a contract between two individuals that are mostly down to tax benefits. The contract can be broken (divorce), provided that there is legal grounding. In this way, legal marriage is no more than a contract, and thus should be available between any two members of society.
One point often brought up against gay marriage, or civil partnerships, is that homosexuality is immoral. Let’s assume for a moment that homosexuality is immoral, according to Christian thought. Other things that are immoral according to Christian thought are: divorce, lying, getting drunk, eating too much, not looking after one’s body, and not worshipping God. Should we legislate on these issues too? Should we make it illegal to eat too much, to not keep one’s body in shape, or not be a Christian? If we are simply going to use the Bible as a replacement for the Statute book, we will run into several problems, and severe restrictions of people’s civil liberties. Thus, I believe that to propose that gay marriage should be banned can only be backed up by suggesting a complete theocracy. Otherwise, we run into contradictions – why ban one sin but not the other?
The anti-gay marriage lobby has also come up with an argument that I must admit I think is entirely ridiculous. The argument is something along the lines of, “Allowing homosexual marriage will damage/undermine heterosexual marriage”. How? How on earth does allowing two people to make a contract with one another (which, I might add, happens thousands of times a day in business, it’s just that the contract is to work for someone or sell something, not avoid tax) undermine your perception of marriage? As the couple may not be married in a Christian sense, Christian marriage has not been undermined at all. What the marriage means is entirely dependent upon what the couple involved believe, and how they view their relationship.
This picture rather accurately describes the Christian Right's jump in logic in regards to legalising gay marriage:

Another argument I have heard proposed by the Christian Right lobby is that to allow gay marriage means that we might as well allow three people to get married, or allow a person to marry their dog. For a start, I do think that we ought to allow three people to be married, because as far as I’m aware, there is no legal barrier against three-way contracts. As for a person to marry their dog, that is an entirely ridiculous idea. Marriage is a contract between two members of the state, two citizens. You can’t make a contract between a person and a dog. If someone wants to have a ‘marriage’, and do the ceremony with their dog somewhere, and commit it to their god, then they are, in their perception, married. And there isn’t a law against that, and nor should there be. The only reason that they shouldn’t be able to make the deal legal is because it would be impossible, as the dog is not capable of legal contract.
A third argument proposed by the anti-gay marriage lobby is that to allow homosexual marriage is to essentially promote, or approve of something which they consider to be sin. To an extent, they are correct; it does give the approval to homosexual relationships. But once again, I call back to the point I made earlier – why stop there? Don’t we give approval to divorce by allowing divorce? Don’t we give approval to Muslims by giving them the legal permission to build mosques? And why is it specifically marriage that we single out homosexuals for in terms of giving approval? If we really want to stop giving approval to homosexuals, then we shouldn’t let them sign any contracts at all. Marriage is the only one which they are barred from.
In conclusion, the reason that people are against homosexual marriage is that they don’t understand the issue of what legal marriage is. Once one realises that homosexual marriage is nothing more than a legal contract between two people, the situation looks a whole lot different.