Opinion:   “Advocates of gay marriage should not be allowed to redefine marriage for the rest of us.



Fact:  Advocates of gay marriage are “the rest of us”, and these kinds of adversarial exclusions contribute to the perception that some amendment supporters are discriminatory. But, the suggestion here is that not only do a group of people not deserve equal civil rights, but they don’t even deserve the right to advocate for those rights. Were advocates of abolition and women's suffrage not 'the rest of us'? Everyone in America is “allowed” to try to redefine whatever they wish. America is a long story of just such 'redefinitions', because the writers of the Constitution did not create a finished document, but a living, amendable one.

Beyond this clarification on “us” and “them”, this statement attempts again to redefine this amendment. Proposition 8 in California sought to define marriage. This amendment doesn’t stop at defining marriage. It defines any form of civil union or domestic partnership as forever illegitimate.