Rev. J. Donald Monan, SJ recently took time out from his busy schedule of being chancellor at Boston College to weigh in on the debate over same-sex marriages. Upholding the company argument, Monan feels that the Supreme Judicial Court was misguided when it concluded that measures excluding same-sex marriages were unconstitutional. People are funny; they never cease to amaze me. For some reason, in all of man's history, in all of America's history, people have tried over and over again to keep certain things theirs and theirs alone. The vote only belongs to men, they argued, women should stay in the private sphere. Civil rights only belong to white people, they continued, blacks simply don't deserve them. We love excluding people, don't we ... makes us feel good about ourselves. Only I get to vote, only I get to drink from this water fountain, only I get to join in marriage with the one I love ... not you, you're a woman, too emotional to vote, you're black, too inferior to deserve rights, you're gay, marriage is for heterosexuals only.
Why? Because of some arcane Biblical law that judged "Sodomites" to be less than people? That's a very enlightened though. Homosexuals can't marry, according to those that support Monan and his cohorts, because marriage is a sacred institution set forth by God to include two people able to procreate. Okay, marriage is sacred, just go ask Britney Spears. Perhaps nothing best expresses Monan's misguided, sad opinion than the title to his article in the Boston Globe, "'Equal' does not mean 'same.'" When I first read the title, after logging on to BCInfo, I almost couldn't believe it. Here's a man, the Chancellor of BC, an institution of higher learning, using the same argument used during the segregation days of the South. Schools, bathrooms, park benches, buses - exclude blacks from any, as long as they have a "separate but equal" alternative. Monan's exact words were, "the difference between same- and opposite-sex relationships merits them significantly different roles in human life without either being relegated to a second-class example of the other." Flash back 50 years, and I can hear a Father Monan arguing that relegating blacks to the back of the bus, keeping them in their own schools, is because blacks and whites are "significantly different" and keeping them separated does not mean that blacks are "relegated to a second-class example of the other." We see how that turned out. Excluding people and keeping the faade of equality is a farce. We exclude those from things in order to feel superior, feel better than those who aren't allowed to participate.
Wake up Father Monan. Wake up Catholic Church. Every day, every single day people are dying all across the world due to AIDS. Every single day Palestinians and Israelis are needlessly dying because of an age old argument. Every single day people all across the globe, including here in America, are worrying about whether they will eat today. Every single day. And you have the gall to spend your time writing in the Boston Globe and proselytizing the exclusion of certain people from "sacred" marriage. Where are your priorities? I'm sick and tired of those who purport to represent Christ sitting on their high horses denouncing those that don't fit the bill of their exclusive religious club. The Bible claims that homosexuality is a sin. The Bible claims that marriage is exclusively between man and a woman. Yeah, well the Bible also says that thou shall not eat shellfish, yet I don't see Father Monan on the doorsteps of Legal Seafood trying to shut them down for breaking the laws of Moses ... Wake up. We have so little time here on Earth, and you waste it trying to exclude people from something that you hold dear. Well, Father Monan, gay men and women that want to get married hold marriage dear too.
We waste so much energy on hatred, on keeping those we don't like out of our stupid little cliques and clubs. Wake up, the world sucks. If two people love one another, and find happiness with one another in a world fill with strife, hatred, and death, for God's sake, let them marry and leave them alone.
Kevin Hoskins is a senior in the College of Arts & Sciences.
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