[Durham INC] marriage is not a civil right

[Christine Chamberlain]

You already have full civil rights, the same as every other American.  You have not been deprived of the law's equal protection, nor of the 
right to marry  —  only of the right to insist that a single-sex union 
is a "marriage."  You want marriage on entirely new terms. You want it to be 
given a meaning it has never before had, and prefer that it be done undemocratically  —  by judicial fiat, for example, or by mayors 
flouting the law. Whatever else that may be, it isn't civil rights. 

But dare to speak against it, and you are threatened, called names and are branded a "racist".

In one state, when lawmakers prepared to debate a 
constitutional amendment on the meaning of marriage, the state's leading black clergy came out strongly in support of the age-old definition: 
the union of a man and a woman.  They were promptly tarred as enemies of civil rights.  "Martin Luther King," one left-wing legislator barked, 
"is rolling over in his grave at a statement like this." 

But if anything has King spinning in his grave, it is the indecency 
of exploiting his name for a cause he never supported.  The civil rights movement for which he lived and died was grounded in a fundamental 
truth: All of us are created equal.  The same-sex marriage movement, by 
contrast, is grounded in the denial of a fundamental truth: we are created as equal , male and female.  That duality has 
always been the starting point for marriage.  The newly 
fashionable claim that marriage can ignore that duality is akin to the 
claim, back when lunch counters were segregated, that America was a land of liberty and justice for all.  
 
Christine Chamberlain
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