I am no attorney, and I often try to talk law students out of their intended career. But after working in law offices for more than 15 years it is impossible not to attempt to think legally. And it is less dangerous to blog about law than to practice amateur medicine; no one will die if I’m wrong.

But on this same-gender marriage issue that will not go away for years to come (it first burst into our consciousness in 1997 when the Hawaii Supreme Court saw no reason to people of the same gender shouldn’t have the right to a civil marriage), sometimes it is hard to express a legal reasoning that even makes senses in the court of public opinion. After all, the public doesn’t follow anything which is too complex or convoluted, so if you want to change public opinion you have to keep it simple. But that’s how Proposition 8 slipped by the voters in the first place.

Anyway, it occurs to me that all LGBT people already have the right to get married! As individuals, we can get married in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Just not to each other except in a handful of states. In other words, as individuals we can always marry heterosexually. We can marry someone of the opposite gender.

So by my reasoning we are not fighting for individual rights. (Well, I know we really fighting for the right to marry the human being of our choice without some wingnut insisting that it would lead to bestiality.) My reasoning is that it is lesbian or gay couples who are fighting for equal rights. My fundamental question is, Does the concept of justice and equality before the law extend to couples, period, not just to individuals?

We’ve already seen corporations given enormous legal rights, including the recent Supreme Court decision that gives corporations the right to buy candidates for public office and sell them to the voters (but that’s another issue). So it isn’t a stretch to begin analyzing this issue by arguing that lesbian couples and gay couples are entitled to legal rights.

Is that hair-splitting or unimportant? No, it’s central, because in fact American marriage laws grant rights to couples. Federal law, it has been determined, grants 1,049 distinct rights to married couples which are given to them through the vehicle of civil marriage. Most of these rights, I think it can be argued, are grant to the couple, not to the individuals who are in the marriage.

If that can be satisfactorily explained, then it makes perfectly clear sense to me that, under “due process” and a lot of other legal theorizing which make up the stuff of civil rights cases being argued in courtrooms, gay couples and lesbian couples cannot rightfully be discriminated against and heterosexual couples be given carte blanche.

Okay, that much is clear in my mind, but so what? Well as we watch the Perry v. Schwarzenegger case play out in the next 2-3 years, I want to watch how couples are treated legally. Do lesbian couples, for example, have the same rights under domestic partnership law as they would have under marriage law? Do gay male couples have identical rights under a civil union as they would automatically receive in a civil marriage?

Good questions. Check back often for answers.

—Pastor Dan Hooper