The ongoing trial in California over the constitutionality of Proposition 8, the voter-approved ballot measure that banned same-sex marriage, is quickly becoming a joke. First, the proponents of gay-marriage set out to prove that the voters who supported Proposition 8 were motivated by hate, as if that could be proven. What are they going to do, find all the people who voted for Prop 8, call them to the stand, ask them why the oppose gay marriage? Now opponents of Prop 8 are calling witnesses to the stand who are testifying that the ban on gay marriage is costing state and local governments large amounts of money. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, Ted Egan, the chief economist in the San Francisco Controller’s Office, and M. V. Lee Badgett, the research director at the University of California at Los Angeles’s Williams Institute, a sexual-orientation-law think tank, testified that allowing Prop 8 to stand is costing the City of San Francisco $37.2 million a year and the State of California $490 million over three years. Both Egan and Badgett said that these figures represent the spending and tax revenue that could potentially be created by allowing gay weddings.
What does this information have to do with the constitutionality of Prop 8? Whatever your position on gay marriage is, I’m sure you can agree that discussing the economic impact of Prop 8 has no relevance to a trial that is supposed to determine whether or not the law is consistent with California’s state constitution.
This testimony also offends me because it is kind of like making a deal with the devil. Sure, the State of California and the City of San Francisco may get all this tax revenue if gay marriages were allowed, but at what cost? The tax revenue that gay marriages may bring in cannot match the cost of all the social programs that the government will have to provide when the institution of marriage essentially means nothing in our society. In addition, all the money in the world can’t make up for the misery that homosexuals endure (whether they know it or not) when we essentially send them the message that sexual relationships involving two people of the same sex are just as good as heterosexual ones. And let’s not forget the children adopted by homosexual couples. I know a man who knows a teenage girl who was adopted by a lesbian couple, and she is so frustrated because all she is exposed to is the gay lifestyle. We’re creating a group of kids that is going to be very confused about appropriate gender roles and how men and women are supposed to interact with one another.
Please, let’s pray for the judge in this case, that he doesn’t pay any attention to all this talk about lost tax revenue, and that he does what is right and follows the laws of the State of California. Let’s also pray for those trapped in the sin of homosexuality and for their conversion, as well as for the children being raised by homosexual couples who need to see the complimentarity of men and women.
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