Illinois Rep. Tom Morrison, a
Republican, has defended comparing gay marriage to polygamy and
statutory rape.
Morrison made the comparisons in an
email to a constituent.
“If one male and one female is
discriminatory, then isn't limitation of marriage to just two people
discriminatory, too?” Morrison wrote. “There are men who would
like to marry two or more consenting females. Would you define their
relationship as marriage, too? Could a man marry a consenting 9-year
old girl? Why not? To refuse them would be discrimination. Again,
where would you draw the line?”
A bill which seeks to legalize such
unions in Illinois awaits action in the House after passage in the
Senate.
Kathleen Betts told Talking
Points Memo that she sent her initial email in an attempt to
appeal to Morrison's “sensibility for equal rights.”
Morrison apologized to Betts in a
subsequent email but he also defended his stance.
“The point I was trying to make was
this: the state already has certain restrictions on what marriage
is,” Morrison wrote. “The law itself makes distinctions on who
can and cannot marry. For example, one cannot be married to more
than one person at the same time. You are not advocating for
polyamory (I don't think), but there are those in Illinois who do.
Just google Polyamory Chicago, and see for yourself. They argue that
the state is discriminating against their sexual orientation, love,
desire to commit, freedom, equality, etc. …”
“Changing a law like this is not a
light matter. Same sex relationships have been around for millenia,
obviously, but codifying marriage as a relationship without regard to
gender is a shift of enormous proportions. Interracial marriages
have been in existence for millenia, too. Though they were
temporarily (in the scope of human history) outlawed in certain
jurisdictions, the unions were still of man and woman. That's why I
don’t believe it's appropriate to say SB10 is analogous with
interracial marriage laws, by the way.”
(Related: Illinois
Rep. Jeanne Ives says gays trying to “weasel their way into
acceptability.”)