news-record.com

For years now, we’ve been hearing from opponents to same-sex marriage that the legal validation of such unions would undermine and threaten traditional marriage between a man and a woman. I have been married to my husband for 20 years, and I just can’t see how anyone else’s marriage can have any effect on the status of mine. There’s just no logic there, only a lot of fear.

It sounds to me a lot like opponents of the civil rights movement, decades ago, believing that swimming in the same pool with people of different races might permanently alter the color of their own skins. There was never any truth there, either, just anxiety and ignorance. My marriage is between my husband and me, not between us and other couples who are married.

If our society spent as much time focusing on our own marriages as we do worrying about who else should or shouldn’t be joined in matrimony, perhaps the divorce rate would decrease, and that seems like a much better way to preserve whatever sanctity the institution of marriage may still possess.

Diane Burris
Greensboro