Last night, I read an article on the Huffington Post, Why Gay Marriage is the Wrong Issue by Bob Ostertag that got me to thinking. My comment follows below:
The recent trend in the gay civil rights movement to center its efforts on gaining the legal right to marriage reminds me of how the first wave of feminism, which began in 1848, originally pushed for all sorts of civil rights for women, but it eventually ended up concentrating on a single civil right: the right to vote.
While gaining the right to vote was a crucial step in the cause for women's rights, sexism did not end in 1920, nor has it ended yet in 2008. The same will be true of the push for full equal rights for homosexual citizens being reduced to pushing for the single civil right; that of marriage. While as long as marriage exists as a legal category, I believe that all consenting adults should have this right, regardless of sexual orientation, gaining the right to marriage will in no way end homophobia. Let's not forget the wider cause and let's not see marriage as the be-all and end-all of gay rights.
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I do think, however, that there will be laws that give partners some of the rights of marriage. A lot of people spend a lifetime with another person and now have no legal rights to anything when their partner dies. I don't know if the country is in the mood for this much of a change but it will happen.
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