EQUAL RITES A deafening silence in the US on gay marriage BY MARY ANN SORRENTINO

As Canada to the north, Spain across the Atlantic, and countries around the globe offer to their homosexual citizens the same rights as married men and women, the United States sits in stony defiance. Some say it is the word "gay" in the phrase "gay marriage" that causes America to reject the concept.

It is the word "marriage," instead.

If gays and lesbians were asking for "civil unions" or legal "domestic contracts," their fellow citizens probably wouldn’t object as strongly, if at all.

After all, gays and lesbians sign contracts all the time. They sign leases and business agreements. They negotiate and set their signatures to multi-million dollar Hollywood contracts, mergers and acquisitions in industry, stock transfers, trusts and estates, wills, employment agreements, birth and death certificates, and what-have-you. The names of gay and lesbians Americans have appeared on treaties and tariff agreements, no doubt, military orders, and documents binding those citizens to their country and other nations as well.

Most of America says nothing. These transactions, after all, are generally devoid of any individual intimate aspect.

Marriage would be too personal. It would recognize the humanity that America is so reluctant to grant to its gay and lesbian children. Used to treating homosexuals as impersonal anomalies in our society, we seem reluctant to admit they are persons who live and love among us and feel as we do. We care less that they are "gay" than we do that they might "marry."

Marriage would mean love and intimacy, mutual sacrifice, and family units that struggle in the same ways heterosexuals do. Marriage would mean admission that gays and lesbians, even now without "marriage," live together, take care of each other, and are united in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, for richer for poorer, ’til death do they part. More difficult for Americans to swallow, homosexuals may be more committed than their heterosexual counterparts.

A society where "marriage" is treated so frivolously that half the unions end in divorce shies away from marrying people who take that legal contract very seriously.

Heterosexual couples have given marriage such a bad name, it seems, one wonders why anyone outside that circle might want to break into it. The "married" label may not be all it’s cracked up to be in America.