| Joelcool7 said: Alright I recently got in a debate over gay marriage and the right of marriage in general. I was called uneducated etc...etc.. for not believing marriage is a right under the declaration of rights or Canada, USA, Australian Constitutions. However I knew my declaration of rights pretty well and with a nights research realized that not only is marriage not a legal right guaranteed in the Canadian constitution or Declaration of Rights but it isn't in the US Constitution or Bill of Rights either or the Australian ones. |
Rights can be covered without being explicitly stated. The US constitution doesn't directly grant Freedom of Association... but it is considered to be covered due to, among other things, the freedom of speech component of the first amendment.
Similarly, I would argue that "marriage", being a primarily religious observance, is covered by the Freedom of Religion component of their first amendment. Meanwhile, I would consider the secular component, which are effectively civil unions anyway, are covered by Freedom of Association, as a form of speech, supported especially in the case of gay marriage (or rather, gay civil unions) by the Fourteenth Amendment, which ensures that all people get equal protection under the law, which means that if two people can associate in a particular way and get benefits from that, then such an association should be applicable to any two people.
Also see the Ninth amendment, which does specifically say that the bill of rights is not a full listing of rights, but just a codification of a few of the most important ones.
This is one of the secrets of the various constitutions - they're written to be fairly broad, to allow for interpretation. Why? Because otherwise some people in the future will try to claim that rights not explicitly stated are not covered, and this concern was specifically raised by one member of the Georgia delegation in 1787 - "If we list the set of rights, some fools in the future are going to claim that people are entitled only to those rights enumerated and no others."
