Recently, same sex marriage became a very popular subject in United States. More and more states are actually debating if they should allow it or not if they have not already, and a lot of people are protesting against or for it. Those two states of mind are really closely related to two different concepts, which are libertarianism and utilitarianism.
On one side, there are those who support same sex marriage, either heterosexuals or homosexuals. Those people are related to the concept of libertarianism for many reasons. Libertarianism supports mainly the rights of human beings. Therefore, homosexuality has the right of being part of marriage, because marriage isn’t specified to be solely between men and women. Also, liberties nowadays include everything that doesn’t affect others’ liberties. For that reason, it is a pretty valuable reason to support gay marriage if you are prone to libertarianism.
On the other hand, there are those who do not support same sex marriage, and those people relate much more to utilitarianism. Utilitarianism, as Bentham said, is to provide the greatest amount of happiness to the greatest amount of people. Here, according to those against same sex marriage, the greatest amount of people are straight and marriage is supposed to be a bond between a man and a woman only. For those, giving the right for same sex marriage isn’t providing happiness to the majority. They want themselves to be happy, even if it doesn’t fit the minority.
In this conflict between gay wedding supporters and non-supporters, there is actually a fight between utilitarianism and libertarianism, the initial, thinking about the logical thing to do for their own good, and the latter about the moral thing to do for the people concerned.
