In response to Sean McCauley's Feb. 28 column, "Gay marriage: The national illusion":
I was disappointed to make it through Sean McCauley’s Feb. 28 opinion column, “Gay marriage: The national illusion,” without finding any discernable purpose to the article.
McCauley jumps back and forth between arguing that unemployment is an important issue and that gay marriage is an unimportant one. His only support for this assumption is that the national unemployment rate is 7.8 percent, while an estimated 4 percent of the population is homosexual.
McCauley does not seem to realize that these are both complex issues that can’t be summed up in percentages. The issue of same-sex marriage will eventually come down to many factors, including whether Americans come to see marriage as a civil right. And that has nothing to do with the unemployment rate.
The only connection McCauley draws between unemployment and gay marriage is a strange one. At the end of his column, McCauley states, “When the value of the U.S. dollar is worthless, no one will care who marries who and no one will care about sexual orientation.”
This statement has no purpose, unless McCauley is simply entertaining us with a perverse apocalyptic fantasy in which the economy crashes so drastically that gay Americans are too busy scavenging for food to want to marry each other.
The truth is, unemployment and gay marriage are important issues, and the media is responsible for leading an intelligent discussion over both of them. McCauley’s column did not.
Jack Fitzpatrick
Undergraduate
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