Gay Marriage And Natural Law

     With gay marriage before the Supreme Court of the United States, it has once again reared its divisive head and become a front and center issue. In recent years, the voters in thirty states have voted overwhelmingly to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman and to make that definition a part of their respective constitutions. These initiatives have passed with well over sixty percent approval from the voters. The real question is not whether the majority of people support traditional marriage, it is obvious that they do, it is why does polling show results that would lead one to surmise that gay marriage is a 50-50 issue.
     It is easy to explain this disparity between the polls and election results, especially in light of proponents of traditional marriage having been successfully characterized by the Left as homophobes and bigots. Poll respondents claim to support gay marriage so that they are not thought of in a negative light by the pollster. No one wants to be thought of as a bigot, even by a stranger on the other end of the phone. But once in the voting booth they vote their conscience.
     The main argument advanced in favor of gay marriage is that people should be allowed to marry the person that they love, which actually is and has been the case for a long time. Gay marriage has existed for decades in this country in certain religious sects and in many secular settings, it just hasn't been recognized by government, nor should it be. If we allow marriage to have as its only basis the love of individuals, not five thousand years of human tradition and natural law, then polygamy should also be made legal as well as sibling marriage and parent-child marriage. Heck, for that matter, people should be allowed to marry their beloved pets. The love that the aforementioned individuals have should be recognized with an official government sanction, the same as homosexuals are demanding.
     It is a strange twist that gay rights advocates, after years of saying that they want the government and others out of their bedrooms, now want their bedrooms placed in the public domain. The whole idea that individuals would claim special status as a group based on a sexual act is anathema to common sense and a rational reading of thousands of years of natural law. The shifting values of the gay rights movement is illustrative of the rootless and temporal nature of Leftist ideology in general. Since their positions are based solely on emotion, and are not tethered to the foundation of natural law, they are forever readjusting their values based on the current political winds. This is one of the biggest differences between Conservatives and Leftists. In the Leftist world, values have an expiration date that corresponds to their ability to be politically expedient. Conservatives see values as immutable and created by the natural order of things and resulting in the best outcome for anyone who lives by them. This is not always the path of least resistance, but it is the path that leads its travelers to true happiness and real justice.