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February 8, 2004
Dear Senator Frist:
I'm reading your speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference on January 23, 2004, and feel that you are completely missing the intentions of the founding fathers.
They didn't write the definition of "family" into the Constitution because the government has no business defining what a family is. They *came* to the new world to get *away* from religious persecution, and they're probably rolling in their graves knowing that it's rearing its ugly head yet again.
You are welcome to define a religious marriage however you see fit. Many religions agree with you and will only marry a man and a woman. Others believe that a family is defined by those who commit to loving and supporting each other, and will marry those willing to do so. That religious freedom already exists and will not change unless you complete the job of destroying the Constitution that you are threatening to embark on the start of.
What *is* at issue are the legal rights of citizens. You claim to reject hatred and intolerance, and yet that is at the very center of this debate. What can be more hateful than denying the right of one spouse to visit another in the hospital, or to be told that they do not have the right to make key medical decisions for an incapacitated spouse. Or for a hateful family to take away shared possessions adding to the grief of the loss of a spouse. *These* issues are at the center of the legal marriage debate, and there is nothing more hateful than trying to deny these rights to loving committed partners.
Finally, I would point out that freedom only has meaning if you apply it to things you don't approve of: the freedom for me to be or do only what you approve of is no freedom at all.
The question is: will the America of the future be a *free* country, or will it be a theocratic tyranny of the sort that drove our forefathers to this country in the first place, and that is now, and has been for centuries, tearing apart the Middle East?
You are one of the people who will be making that decision for us.
Posted by abatie at February 8, 2004 10:18 PM