AspectRain

Philosophy and personal beliefs aside, here are two logical reasons against banning gay marriage. One argument addresses the rights of churches, and the second brings up the difficulty in gender classification and its bearing on legally defining marriage.

Argument 1:  Church and State
Churches and officiants have the right to choose who they will marry within their own rules. But why does one church get to decide who another church is allowed to marry? Not all Christian churches are against gay marriages, and there are other religions besides. There are even nonreligious people in this world, who marry in nondenominational ways. Set aside the issues of homosexuality, this is an instance of the state deciding what all churches are allowed to do.

Legalizing gay marriages doesn’t force the Catholic Church to marry gay people. At this time, men and women can marry legally, but the Catholic church can turn away couples living together before marriage, or some churches won’t marry a couple if either partner is not a member. They have that right. People have the right to choose the church or path that fits them.

Even if gay marriage is legalized, those unions, like any other union not sanctified by Church A, will not be recognized by Church A’s God or doctrine. Nothing forces them to.

Argument 2:  The Gender Problem
If we are to define marriage as a union between man and woman, then we will have to come up with better scientific definitions for those genders. According to researcher Eric Vilain at the University of California, Los Angeles, “the biology of gender is far more complicated than XX or XY chromosomes.”

There are 17 or so conditions that can involve intersexuality, be they anatomy, chemistry/metabolism, genetics, or (taking up very little of this list) mentally/emotionally.

From Wikipedia:

The prevalence of intersex depends on which definition is used.

According to the ISNA definition above, 1 percent of live births exhibit some degree of sexual ambiguity, approximately one in every hundred births. [32] Between 0.1% and 0.2% of live births are ambiguous enough to become the subject of specialist medical attention, including surgery to disguise their sexual ambiguity.

According to Fausto-Sterling’s definition of intersex[33], on the other hand, 1.7 percent of human births are intersex.[33] She writes,

“While male and female stand on the extreme ends of a biological continuum, there are many bodies […] that evidently mix together anatomical components conventionally attributed to both males and females. The implications of my argument for a sexual continuum are profound. If nature really offers us more than two sexes, then it follows that our current notions of masculinity and femininity are cultural conceits.

“[…] Modern surgical techniques help maintain the two-sex system. Today children who are born “either/or-neither/both” — a fairly common phenomenon — usually disappear from view because doctors “correct” them right away with surgery.”

According to Leonard Sax the prevalence of intersex “restricted to those conditions in which chromosomal sex is inconsistent with phenotypic sex, or in which the phenotype is not classifiable as either male or female” is about 0.018%.

To put those numbers into perspective:

• 5,493,359: Number of people in US with a known condition in which chromosomal sex is inconsistent with phenotypic sex, or in which the phenotype is not classifiable as either male or female. This does not include other types of gender ambiguity.
• 2,831,000: Number of Jewish people in US (Based on The American Religious Identification Survey in 2001)
• 3,051,866: Number of adults with a peanut allergy (about the same number of children have a peanut allergy, and 1 in 4 outgrow it) (Wikipedia)
• 4,038,741: Population of the entire Seattle Metro Area (United States Census Bureau of 2003)

There are people who look, act, and identify themselves as heterosexual men or women, but if tested, their chromosomes suggest otherwise. This is a reality, it’s part of the oddity that is Nature.

A couple examples:

- Someone born XXXY, or any other variation of mosaicism can’t legally say male or female, if male and female is legally defined to be XY and XX.

- An XY person born with micropenis underwent nonconsensual sex reassignment surgery as an infant and is reared as female. Eventually she meets a man and want to get married, but both are genetically XY. Or, she identifies as a lesbian. Will they be allowed marriage because it is then an XX and XY pairing? If this person should transition back to his birth gender, things could get even more confusing. (This condition is androgen insensitivity syndrome, AIS)

The International Olympic Committee once tried to find a way to strictly define the line between men and women for the games. They figured out the high frequency of intersex the hard way. Before the 1936 games, athletes were allowed to sort themselves out. But then Hermann Ratjen cheated by trying to pass himself off as a woman and, though Ratjen lost, he set Olympic officials off on a quest for the ultimate divider of males and females. First they tried genital exams, but that didn’t work so well. They found that a lot of athletes had confusing parts. Then in 1968, the IOC turned to buccal smears for would-be competitors in female sports. The idea was to rout out anyone with a Y chromosome. That didn’t work well either; a number of women athletes had Y chromosomes because they were born with AIS.

More from http://www.isna.org/node/670

For a few years, the IOC in fact did try to insist that AIS women were men; once they figured out which women had AIS, they tried to get them to give back their medals. But the medical establishment, to its credit, rallied around these women and explained the facts of biology—especially intersex—to the IOC. And so the IOC finally gave up gender verification.

Whether or not the medical establishment rallies to explain intersex to the U.S. courts remains to be seen. If history is any guide, as gay marriage prohibitions make their way through the courts, a scientific expert here and a medical expert there will offer up one little gene or one type of anatomical tissue that might be used as a male-female sorting mechanism. But such a sorting system simply won’t accord with what people see on the outside and feel on the inside. The fact is, every anatomical bit you think of as female (breasts, XX-chromosomes, even ovarian tissue) can be found on someone who has looked and felt like a male since birth. The opposite is also true. Think about it: if sex categories really were naturally strict, we wouldn’t see so many cosmetic surgeons offering men breast reductions and offering women facial electrolysis.

Banning Gay Marriage is difficult because we cannot define male and female scientifically. They are vague categories who currently lack strict medical definition that works for all possibilities. This opens the law up to loopholes and difficult situations for millions of people across the nation, plus their partners and families.