Maryland's AG is right

Last year the state supreme court upheld a 34-year-old state statute defining marriage as between a man and a woman. The attorney general's office defended the law in that case, and he has said the court made the right decision based on the law as it is written: the law should be changed by the legislature. Now a bill, SB290, is in the state legislature, a bill to make same-sex marriage legal in Maryland. Last week, our AG stood up on the right side (as reported by Laura Smitherman in the Sun):

Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler has become the most prominent official in Maryland to endorse gay marriage, telling state legislators yesterday that he believes the current ban on same-sex unions amounts to discrimination.

"It would be hard for me to have this job knowing there is something so wrong in our society," Gansler told the Senate panel considering a bill to legalize gay marriage. "I just think it's wrong to discriminate against any people because they think differently or because of their sexual orientation."

But Gansler also said that lawmakers in Annapolis might not have the "political courage" to legalize gay marriage this year and that the General Assembly will probably "settle" for civil unions, which would confer many of the rights afforded to married heterosexual couples.

Of course, there were a lot of people testifying against SB290. For instance, the perfectly named

Kathleen Crank, who described herself as a stay-at-home mother and wife, said she felt compelled to testify for a constitutional ban because the "homosexual lifestyle" is "devastating." She said: "Redefining marriage is an activity undertaken to the peril of our civilized society."

Yeah, like Canada, Britain, Scandinavia, and Massachusetts have discovered.

And I'm not quite sure what is so "devastating" about getting married. I always thought the "homosexual lifestyle" (as opposed to life) was Fire Island or the Castro. These are just ordinary folks who want a home, a mortgage, and a family. After all, 339 Maryland laws provide for benefits and rights conditioned on marital status. Not all of them can be duplicated by filing powers of attorney and what-not, and all come packaged in with a $55 marriage license.

A license from the state of Maryland, mind you. From the state.

It's axiomatic that the state (any state, this nation in fact) can not and should not be able to force any church to recognize, much less perform, any marriage. But the state nevertheless went against many churches when it permitted divorced people to remarry, Christians to marry Jews, whites to marry blacks, and atheists to marry at all.

I'm proud to have voted for Gansler.