Immoral

My best friend Mark's friends W and A have known each other since they were six--they are now in their mid-40s. They've been a couple for 17 years now.

W is in poor health. The particulars are really neither here nor there. Earlier this week--Monday, I believe, W suffered a massive heart attack. He spent several days in the cardiac ICU, suffering from (at the least) kidney failure. He, at one point in time, had a roughly 50/50 chance of survival.

Mark, having once worked as W's personal assistant, knows his cardiologist. He guessed the right hospital, and was able to call and find out that W was indeed there, and that he was in the ICU.

Everyone is mostly in the dark about W's status. When he was moved from ICU to a telemetry room (I think), I asked Mark if W's prognosis had improved. He didn't know. More importantly, A didn't know. See, W & A are gay. So they cannot marry. So A has no right to information about the man he's devoted himself to for the better part of two decades. (Yes, being given W's medical power of attorney would have made a slight difference there--but really, how many people have the foresight to sign that document, regardless of sexual orientation?)

My boyfriend has said more than once on his blog that the problem with democracy is that it allows 51% of the people to force their views on the other 49%. I've told him he's not quite right to say that. Given voter turnout, there's really no such thing as majority rule.

When the prohibition of homosexual marriage was, God forgive us, encoded in the Texas constitution, the voter turnout was somewhere in the neighborhood of 17% - 21% (I don't recall the exact number, but it was tiny). I'm not even certain how to figure a percentage of a percentage, but it's plainly obvious that a very small minority of Texans was able to strip an entire group of people of their rights.

I would love to see an honest philosophical defense of this. It's not even decent Utilitarianism--there's no greatest good served here. It certainly fails Kant's imperative that you make no moral law to which you except yourself. It's definitely not good Christianity, as Jesus commanded us all to love one another as I have loved you.

Nothing, but nothing, is morally acceptable about preventing a long-in-love couple from marrying one another. I could be married to the Pistolero by the end of the year (I won't be, but I could be), and we've been a couple only three months.

Morality, logic, conservatism...this fiasco fails all three of these tests.