To the editor:

As a straight, happily married mother of two, I am outraged by the proposed constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. Bush’s argument that the “sanctity” of marriage must be “protected” is incendiary rhetoric but fails any logical test.

For one thing, the idea of what God intended marriage to be comes from a particular set of religious beliefs, and this country is founded on the separation of church and state. My God, thank God, would never declare that two people who love each other should not be allowed to marry. To inscribe beliefs based on someone else’s idea of God into the Constitution discriminates against my beliefs.

Further, as a country, we allow heterosexual atheists who hypothetically don’t believe in the “sanctity” of marriage at all to get married all the time. For that matter, if the “sanctity” of marriage needs to be protected, why have we as a society not legislated against the ways in which straight people violate that sanctity all the time — through adultery, frivolous marriages that last only weeks and so on?

The fact that we haven’t reveals that it’s not really the “sanctity” of marriage that is at issue at all but discrimination against gays. Gay marriage does not threaten the “sanctity” of my marriage, which will continue on as it was whether gays and lesbians are allowed to marry or not.

Marta Caminero-Santangelo,

Lawrence