Subject: Defense of Marriage
It has come to my attention that you have recently introduced a bill
titled Defense of Marriage which would amend the US Constitution to
prevent the civil marriage of two people of the same gender.
Although there is plenty of evidence to support the idea that this
bill is founded on certain religious principles which the first
amendment to the same constitution clearly prohibits ("Congress shall
make no law respecting an establishment of religion"), I would like to
offer up some evidence of neither a religious nor legal nature which I
think should be considered before such a bill might be passed and
which I think may have been overlooked by yourself and your staff.
The evidence I speak of is medical in nature.
A close friend of mine was born with neither a complete male nor a
complete female anatomy. My friend has an endocrine system which
exhibits what are traditionally considered both positively male and
positively female traits. This has produced a condition which has
resulted in both fully developed mamary glands and testicles, or
perhaps more strikingly, a uterus and a fully-functional phallus.
What concerns me about your Defense of Marriage bill is the definition
of gender. I'm curious to know how my friend's gender would be treated
by the language of the bill. Would my friend be allowed to marry
another person of either gender, since they have the organs which
would make them heterogenous with that person, or would they be denied
the right to marry on the basis of having the organs which would make
them a homosexual partner with either gender? Would the bill ignore
such circumstances leaving special cases a matter for States' rights
resulting in such idiocies as the State of Florida's assignment of
gender based on a state issued photo ID? (In other words a person's
gender is an entry in a database, not a physical condition of their
body.) Or would the federal government adopt the same idiocy and
simply choose the gender indicated in the Social Security database?
I would contend that incomplete and innacurate catalogs do not dictate
the state of physical reality. That is to say that regardless of what
our documentation might indicate, my friend remains neither male, nor
female. Neither is this a condition which any amount of surgery will
ever change.
Although I have no interest in a civil marriage to my friend or anyone
else, I acknowledge that many people in our culture do desire civil
marriages, including my friend. I do not feel that they should be
denied a civil marriage. To allow my friend a civil marriage to anyone
while denying any homosexual couple a civil marriage would be
hipocritical however, since my friend's body can meet the definition
of homosexual by having all of the same anatomy as any other person to
whom they might be married.
To bring this discussion back to the matter of this bill being
grounded in religious belief, I don't think that a reasonable argument
for this bill could be made in the context of Christian religion, even
if it were legal for the federal government to pass laws which respect
its institutions. I say this because the widely held tenets of
Christian religions are that God is omniscient, omnipotent, and
purposeful. This is to say that there is nothing on the earth which
God has not created and nothing on the earth which God has not
intentionally created exactly as it is.
As my friend's body has never undergone any modification to achieve
its current state (they were born with this anatomy), a person
believing in the Christian god must accept that this anatomy is what
God intended for this person. If this is the case then it cannot be
for government to decide whether God intended this person to live a
celibate life. Any government which is incapable of accurately
documenting their anatomy cannot be adequate to make spiritual
decisions regarding that anatomy. Such a decision can only be made by
the individual whose anatomy is in question. Therefore decisions of
civil marriage must only be decided by the individuals whose marriage
is in question.
s. isaac dealey 954.927.5117
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