Same-sex Marriage Headlines

In the past few weeks, advocates for, and against gay marriage have dominated the headlines, thanks to comments made by Chick-fil-A’s President, Dan Cathy. It seems that this large, Atlanta-based chicken franchise is “very much support of the family” but according to Mr. Cathy, family is the union of Adam and Eve…not “Adam and Steve”.

To make a long story short, due to Mr. Cathy’s strong position against same-sex marriage, there was a boycott of Chick-fil-A restaurants and numerous political leaders spoke out against Mr. Cathy’s views.

On the flipside, supporters by the thousands lined up outside of Chick-fil- A establishments nationwide as a show of their support of Mr. Cathy’s position against same sex-marriages.

Yet, the controversy over gay marriage is not limited to lovers of fried chicken. Only a month before the Chick-fil-A story, the state of Washington and Denmark were making homosexual marriage headlines.

The group Preserve Marriage Washington submitted a petition with over 200,000 signatures and stalled the law that was to come into effect the following day which would allow gay marriage. This would have made Washington only the seventh state to allow gay marriage, but this will have to wait until the November Referendum.  Washington state passed Domestic Partnership laws in 2007 and granted additional rights to same-sex couples in 2009, but marriage is a step that voters at that time were not ready to make.

At the same time, Denmark, where gay marriage became legal in 1989, ordered the state church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church to perform gay marriages, and giving same-sex couples the right and the opportunity to receive the church’s blessing.

Pastors who strongly oppose gay marriage will not be required to perform ceremonies, and already the Danish People’s Party and the Christian Democratic Party have spoken against this new law so only time will tell if the Danes will look to the state of Washington or Mr. Cathy for direction on the issue of same-sex rights.