Prof. Teresa Collett offers some thoughts on the proposed marriage-protection amendment to our state's Constitution ("May debate over marriage include facts," Oct. 21) and encourages others to do the same. Since my conscience leads me to a very different view of this issue, I appreciate the civil tone of her article, and I accept her invitation to continue the conversation. However, I feel the need for a clearer understanding of her positions, because I find many of them confusing.

Collett first states that the correct title for the amendment is "marriage-protection" rather than "gay-marriage," but then goes on to argue that the real purpose is neither, but rather child protection. That is, the state has an interest in the institution of marriage because heterosexual unions often result in children.

I have no problem with that statement. But I have heard no proposals for abolishing heterosexual marriage, so what are we protecting here? And if the state's primary reason for sanctioning marriage is the possibility that children may result, should heterosexual couples be required to pass a fertility test before they are granted a license? Should that license be revoked if the childbearing years pass with no issue? Should women beyond their childbearing years be allowed to marry?

The professor asserts that children who are raised by their married, biological parents usually have fewer problems than those given up for adoption, those born to unmarried parents, or those whose parents divorce. That's hard to argue against, since, as she notes, many studies appear to support these observations.

But, again, I am confused. How is it an argument against same-sex marriage? Shouldn't these facts instead lead us to outlaw married couples giving up children for adoption; sex outside of marriage, and divorce? Faced with these proven threats to the well-being of children, why are we proposing to prohibit something that no one has been able to demonstrate represents any sort of genuine threat?

You may very well respond that the state has no business intruding upon these most private areas of its citizens' lives. I agree -- so why this amendment?

Since a same-sex marriage does not result in biological offspring, the professor's argument for child protection seems to make sense only if she is also proposing that such couples should not only be prohibited from marrying, but also from adopting children given up by biological parents, or from using the many opportunities offered by modern medicine for conceiving other than by the conventional method. Would those with biological children from a previous heterosexual marriage be required to give them up once they came out of the closet?

If those are indeed the professor's positions, what other unstated denials of rights might be on her list?

Since Collett's field is law, it troubles me that she attempts to support her position by pointing out that "marriage has been defined as the union of one man and one woman since Minnesota's days as a territory." First, since that is the case, we return once again to the question of why this amendment is deemed necessary at all. But let us also not forget that in our state's territorial days the constitutions of both a number of states as well as that of our nation allowed the institution of slavery to exist. The argument that something should still be the case because it was legal a century and a half ago is a poor one.

Within my own lifetime, many states still employed Jim Crow laws to deprive citizens of their right to vote, and numerous communities, including our own beloved Edina, employed sundown laws to prohibit citizens of certain races from exercising their right to enjoy the use of public property after dusk.

The common denominator here is that those legal sanctions deprived citizens of rights not because of things they had done, but because of an accident of birth. If the voters of Minnesota should decide to deprive some of our fellow citizens of the fundamental human right to marriage simply because of the sexual orientation they were born with, would we not be taking a giant and shameful step backward into the benighted views of the past?

As Prof. Collett urged, let the conversation continue.

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Steve Atkinson is retired in Minneapolis.