HARRISBURG – Pennsylvanians shouldn’t expect their legislators to follow those in Trenton and consider legalizing same-sex marriage any time soon.
“Don’t hold your breath in Pennsylvania,” Gov. Rendell said yesterday. “Culturally, given the social mores of the majority of the people of Pennsylvania, it’s going to be a difficult lift.”
Although there are 1.2 million more registered Democrats than Republicans, the Keystone State is deeply conservative on social issues.
Still, there has been a modest shift in favor of same-sex marriage in recent years. In a May poll of Pennsylvanians by Muhlenberg College, 42 percent said they supported the idea. That was up 7 percentage points from similar polls five years earlier.
If I were the mayor of Lancaster, I’d offer sex-change “test-drive” certificates, good for sixty days, that would change your legal sex identity for 60 days, so that people thinking about gender reassignment surgery could experience life as the opposite sex.
Of course, if someone were to arrive in town to get the sex-change certificate, they could then apply for a marriage license, wait three days for it to be issued, and then be married by the Mayor’s office or by any cooperative local clergyman, and then head home.
Oh, I guess that would mean that the sex-change certificate could be misused by same-sex couples in order to marry, wouldn’t it? And Lancaster would be forced to sell hospitality services to all those couples in the mid-Atlantic states, wanting to marry. What a horrid thing to happen to the local tourism industry! What a shameful way to boost the local economy!
The way to get same-sex marriage passed in Lancaster is to promote the idea that a marriage license isn’t a permit to engage in sex, that it’s a life-long partnership that really doesn’t have anything to do with sex. In 1950, marriage offered protections to the children that a couple might have; that’s no longer the case. They have no longer ANY protections that children of unmarried people have. So you just promote same-sex marriage on the idea that marriage is not about sex at all, and same-sex marriage has nothing to do with homosexuality. You eliminate the laws against marriage with someone of close consanguinity and against someone of the same sex at the same time.
Yes I am in favor of gay marriages! I do not believe that anyone should be singled out because of their lifestyle, life choices or other differences. I am an African American heterosexual…go figure,,