Gay Marriage

I am happily married to my hubby for almost 11 years now. It was so easy for us to get married-- we planned for about six months, had the religious ceremony, and then popped in to City Hall for the "official" paperwork and presto chango, we were "official." I think that the law has nothing to do with what you feel in your heart, but I also think that the legal paperwork and a simple one ceremony deal binding two lives, the declaring of your intent in front of everyone, is an important part of the marriage deal. I do not think that marriage is only okay "between a man and a woman" as many of the lawmakers are trying to make it. So I'm thinking a lot about this stuff in San Francisco with gay marriage. I have to say that it does not hurt my marriage at all if two people of the same sex want to also get married. All those pundits who talk about how gays are immoral and have a promiscuous lifestyle are also the same folks who don't want them to take the conservative route towards marriage and monogamy. Talk about ridiculous. I feel so bad for people who really want to get married, and the law says "you're not allowed" because it is SO easy for heterosexuals-- maybe too easy-- and marriage is important.

Men & women screw marriage up all the time-- they pervert the love and so-called morals of marriage for many reasons, from marrying for money, to marrying to piss people off, to marrying for immigration issues, or even because they are alone & scared that they won't ever really find love so why not this person? Gays marrying are trying to say to the world that they are serious about this relationship. It's ridiculous to say they can't legally bind their lives together. Think about the idea of your loved one dying, and you not being able to be in the hospital with them because you're not "family." This is a biggie and it's something many gays have to deal with all the time.

And I think I've ranted about this before here-- I know I have in "real life" talked this over with others. Gays have every right to marriage-- marriage is not a holy writ from God. (Did we get the invitation from Adam & Eve? Nope. They weren't "legally" married cause there was no law! They were shacking up!)

The Christian church of the middle ages didn't even sanction marriage AT ALL between a man and woman, preferring instead celibacy as a path to purity and godliness. So while we talk about the tradition of marriage as "between man and woman" we have to realize that even that so-called "standard" can be called into question, and when politics and times changed, so did the practice of marriage. Barbara Walker's Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets has a great entry on this which is where I get my ideas about it. The church wouldn't allow marriages past the church door for a long time; it was NOT a sacrament, and pagan religions took care of it. I couldn't for the life of me find the book today to quote from it. (Damned messy office). My point is that those saying marriage is a sacred union between a man and woman don't know the history of marriage very well.

But a little bit of Internet search has found a bit of what I wanted to say:

Bartleby.com explains:

The Latin Fathers debated matters of sexuality and marriage. In the ancient world, many thinkers, both Gentile and Jewish, held that sexual relations between man and woman hindered the soul's rise to higher things.

Bartleby also tells us:

With this benign attitude, however, there gradually emerged a strong current of negativism toward the body, of hostility toward sexuality. The Fathers took for granted the superiority of celibacy (total abstinence from all sexual activity) over marriage. Thus, Jerome denigrated marriage; Augustine held marriage to be “a cure forconspicuouse,” with procreation the only truly moral use of, or justification for, sexuality. As in the ancient world, marriage remained a private arrangement, not the concern of civil authorities. Recent historians have disputed the early Christian attitude toward homosexuality. Some scholars argue that early Christian thinkers had a tolerant and positive position on male love and eroticism as being natural; other modern writers claim the Fathers condemned same-sex love and activity.

So what I think here is that we can argue till we turn blue in the face about what God wants (as if we know what she thinks) and we can argue about the intent of early society but we change rules ALL THE TIME when it suits us. People used to think it was perfectly legitimate/legal/moral to own another human being. We changed that, rightfully so. So even if people used to think that marriage should only be between a man and a woman (or not at all, as my quotes above show) we change these laws all the time. Law used to say it was perfectly fine to beat your wife as long as the stick wasn't bigger than your thumb. We changed that (again, rightfully so).

Law is alive-- it shifts and grows and changes with our beliefs. If you look at polls it does seem that an awful lot of people oppose the idea of gay marriage. But I don't know why this is-- and what the questions were, and the polling sample, etc. What do people who oppose gay marriage really oppose? My guess is that they oppose homosexuality in general-- and would prefer gays just not be gay.

If you took away the heterosexism, and asked if two people who love each other and want to devote their lives to each other and have legal rights should have that right, I suspect those people would say "of course the state has no right to intrude" and that it is ridiculous to say a Constitutional ammendment should be written forbidding it. Look at it this way. Change "should gays be allowed to get married" to "should black people" or "should Latinos" or "should Catholics and Protestants" be allowed to get married-- and you'll see the terrible bias built in to the question. If it isn't okay for one minority group to be excluded, it isn't okay for ANY.

I think, (here comes the conspiracy theory) that it has a lot more to do with the fact that if we allow gay marriage, insurance companies, and other monetarily powerful businesses will have to fork over a lot of cash. Any big resistance to change has almost always been about money. So get off the high moral horse, lawmakers, and allow gay marriage. They have every right to screw it up or make it work as the rest of us. Heterosexism is just as bad as any ISM.