Marry and ghey
When I try to talk about marriage I feel like a little girl dipping into her mother’s makeup and clopping around in size eight high heels. I’ve been in relationships with people who had marriage designs, but I’ve never been able to take it seriously. I’m too immature, or something. I haven’t felt those “lifetime commitment” kind of feelings yet. To me, although I’m old enough that most of my peers are getting engaged and married, it’s still something that, well… grown-ups do. Also, husbands have cooties.
There’s one thing I do know: if there was nothing but a tissue-thin shred of common sense keeping me from marrying Reginald Sleeth, a man who hit me, when I was 20 years old, I think my uncle who’s been in a strong and monogamous relationship since I was four should be able to marry his boyfriend if he feels like it. His right supersedes mine if we’re going to start ranking whose rights are more rightier.
But people all over are being stupid and saying that men have to marry only women, and women just men. I’m not entirely positive if they think transgendered people should be allowed to marry anyone, and if so, whom. I suspect there’s about as much disagreement about that as anything else they can’t paint in black and white absolutes.
These people, the ones who are being stupid, may certainly indulge their feelings and freak out about same-sex marriage as much as they like. They can rail against it, publish hateful books and websites, and thunder “Yo butt ain’t made for that!” into the cold, unfeeling sky. Their freedom to speak their minds is just as valuable as mine. However, I refuse to let them legislate against same-sex marriage if I can possibly help it. What’s wrong with hating it while it’s legal? Isn’t freedom just another word for leaving other people alone? It disgusts me that they devote so much time and energy into fucking up nice things (for the sake of argument, let’s just agree that marriage can be one such nice thing) for people who are lucky enough to find “lifetime commitment” love.
I’ve often thought that if I found myself in the position where I wanted to marry a man, I’d feel pretty shitty about enjoying a perk that many of my friends (or even I, if I found myself in the position where I wanted to marry a woman) are currently denied. I’m not saying life is fair, but this is the kind of unfair that really sucks because it’s the kind we could avoid if we could just all stop being asshats. So it’s a quandary: how much would I hypothetically let my distaste for the unfairness intrude on my personal desire to get a free stand mixer?
I came across this October 8, 2009 Savage Love column about hetero marriage. Dan Savage (a sex columnist who is gay, if you’re not familiar) recalled a wedding he’d recently attended, where the heterosexual couple chose the following selection as a reading in their ceremony:
Marriage is a vital social institution. The exclusive commitment of two individuals to each other nurtures love and mutual support. Civil marriage is at once a deeply personal commitment to another human being and a highly public celebration of the ideals of mutuality, companionship, intimacy, fidelity, and family. Because it fulfills yearnings for security, safe haven, and connection that express our common humanity, civil marriage is an esteemed institution and the decision whether and whom to marry is among life’s momentous acts of self-definition.
It is undoubtedly for these concrete reasons, as well as for its intimately personal significance, that civil marriage has long been termed a ‘civil right.’ Without the right to choose to marry, one is excluded from the full range of human experience.
Source: The 2003 Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decision that legalized same-sex marriage in that state.
Dan goes on to say that it would be wonderful if the passage caught on as a wedding reading. I agree. Sure, hetero couples can boycott, or move their weddings to states that have legalized same-sex marriage in an economic and symbolic gesture of support. But not many do, and maybe it isn’t practical to expect them to let even deeply-held political concerns influence their romantic commitments. That reading, though? I think it’s a perfect and fitting gesture, and I would love to see it become the new 1 Corinthians 13.
Thank God for your common sense that kept you from marrying a man who hit you!
My opinion is that the government should get its dirty hands off marriage altogether. Government should do nothing but civil unions, and provide those to gay and straight alike.
That being said, please remember that “These people, the ones who are being stupid,” is most people. When the Massachussets Supreme Court says “Without the right to choose to marry, one is excluded from the full range of human experience”, they are failing to understand all of what a marriage is. The gender distinction is part of what a marriage is, part of the marriage experience. A pair of gay men or a pair of gay women are much more the same than a straight woman and man are. Yes, gays are excluded from the marriage part of human experience, where you live with, love, and share exclusive sex with someone hopefully compatible but of a different gender. However, they are excluded from that by their sexuality, not by marriage laws.
Yes, freedom means leaving people alone. Government should be treating everyone equally before the law, and since legal marriage is a legal union then any two individuals should be able to marry if they want to. Nobody is telling priests and minister they have to perfform a spiritual ceremony when they are morally opposed to it, but the legal process of marriage does not require a spiritual ceremony. If it’s the word ‘marriage’ people are getting hung up on I’m all for instituting new laws that do away with legal marriage all together and recognizing only civil unions.
@Mousie00
I agree about government doing civil unions only, completely. But I am so very sick of the “gay men are already free to marry… a woman!” argument. Nothing naturally excludes gay people from being able to “live with, love, and share exclusive sex with someone hopefully compatible.” The gender part is the least of it.
See, I’m biased here, because I’m bisexual. I don’t like men and women exactly equally, I’m kinda boy-crazy, but I like plenty of women plenty well. And it’s not… it’s not different from the way I like guys. It’s not a separate feeling or a totally different kind of relationship. A date with a woman is a lot like a date with a man. (Also, if it was different, I’d have trouble seeing whose business that was.) The gender gulf just isn’t that wide.
And QP, I completely agree about the “but marriage is for grown-ups!” feeling–I still haven’t aged out of the sense that I shouldn’t be making any major life decisions, I’m just a kid. I expect this feeling to be gone by about age seventy.
@Mousie00 Shifting to civil unions for everyone wouldn’t bother me as a concept, except that it feels like it’s a reaction to the “threat” of same-sex marriage, and coming from a “but, but… THEY can’t be married!” place, which is one of prejudice. Would I support civil unions taking over across the board? Sure. But it would have this depressing tang of “Well some people are ruining this institution and we can’t have that, so we’ll take it away from everyone and pass out a new, safer toy for them to ruin.” If we’re going to dismantle the term “civil marriage” just because “the fags might get their hands on it” we’re doing it for the wrong reasons.
Marriage doesn’t need to be protected. It’s always meant different things to different people, and will continue to mean things that you or I may not approve of to some people. And letting that happen is a matter of civil liberty and respect. Obviously, to me, it doesn’t have to involve just a man and a woman (it also wouldn’t necessarily require sexual exclusivity if I were doing it, so we disagree there too). You say that a “pair of gay men or a pair of gay women are much more the same than a straight woman and man are,” and not only do I think that’s not necessarily true (sure, maybe same-sexed bodies are more similar in their genitals and secondary sexual characteristics, but that’s not addressing the huge variations in body type, personality, emotional makeup, experiences, belief systems, or a thousand other things that can cut clear across gender lines), I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anyone try to define marriage as “a lasting commitment between two dissimilar-as-possible individuals”.
Plus, people of all sexualities can legally get married right now– we all know that gay and bisexual people marry into heterosexual relationships all the time. At the moment, no one is excluded by sexuality, but many are by wanting to live in honesty and commitment with the person they fall in love with. That makes me very sad.
My suggestion of doing away with legal marriage and replacing it across the board comes from the rational that all of the arguments against gay marriage are always religious, and seem to be coming from people who are worried about the spiritual ceremony and not the legal process (which are two completely different things). My solution only goes to remove legal marriage, not marriage ceremonies that conform to religious or moral rules.
Get your civil union and then go on and get whatever kind of ‘marriage ceremony’ you want.
@Robert I agree that this system makes sense; maybe this is the way we should have set things up decades ago. It just bothers me that no one ever cared about civil marriage vs. civil unions until the gay marriage thing became a real social possibility. If we only feel we need to make the change because same-sex marriage feels threatening to some people, that bothers my idealism even though the idea is a good one.
@Holly Pervocracy
Well, we agree on getting rid of government involvement in marriage and allowing civil unions for everybody. It probably won’t bother gay couples very much that I think they’re missing out on something.
I think our perceptions of the gender distinctives in relationships is colored by goals. AFAIK, you are not intending to enter a marriage that you intend to have no escape from. That was my goal in relationships, I was going to get married forever, and make the best of it even if it turned out it sucked despite my best efforts. I don’t think dating a man would have been so different than dating a woman, except for external reasons. Building a home with a man I think would have been very different.
@quizzical pussy
>>>Shifting to civil unions for everyone wouldn’t bother me as a concept, except that it feels like it’s a reaction to the “threat” of same-sex marriage, and coming from a “but, but… THEY can’t be married!” place<<<
I don't think that's how it works. Everybody I know who's seriously in that place insists on government defining marriage as heterosexual only, and given how the issue has fared when it is exposed to voters they have no reason to compromise.
I think the reason that civil unions for everyone is coming up now is because it's one of the rare occasions in US history which shows that there are serious religious differences over marriage. The only other big instance I can think of is the early LDS church with polygamy.
The First Amendment says in part "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof"; the Fourteenth applies that to state & local governments as well as Congress. A government definition of marriage which adheres to the Baptist definition and violates the Unitarian (Pennsylvania), or the other way around (Massachusetts), is not permitted under the Constitution any more than a government definition of prayer. But for most of US history that has been an almost totally theoretical issue, and had no traction.
I happened to be at the MCC Corpus Christi, Texas over the weekend and heard 1 Corinthians 13 preached on for the hundredth time in my life. What a relief it was to hear that message of love delivered without moral editorial! During my Southern (Hypocrite) Baptist upbringing the preacher always had to beak in and talk about “the wrong kind” of love. I could not help but wonder: why it is so hard for other straight people to get the concept of love, pure, unfettered by societal norms, religious construction or gender?