quizzical pussy

Things people seem to like to compare same-sex marriage to:

• Pedophilia
• Zoophilia
• A Slippery Slope
• Counterfeit Money
• Incest
• Drug Abuse
• Polygamy
• Forbidden Clock Love
• Slavery
• Nazi. Fucking. Germany

With a couple exceptions (because I will never tire of Forbidden Clock Love), I think these chestnuts are getting a bit old. Yeah, yeah, marrying a consenting adult of the same sex is exactly like marrying a horse, sure*. But where’s the impact? And frankly, when we’re comparing it to polygamy, which even has a strong Biblical basis for the Christians to enjoy, not to mention a robust history of past acceptance, the argument conspicuously lacks teeth.

So I, being a humanitarian at my core, decided to come up with some exciting new suggestions for gay marriage comparisons.

If I don’t see these proliferate throughout the news media soon, I’ll be disappointed. Try to forge new territory, people. Being cutting-edge gets hard when your belief system is older than your numeral system, I know. But that’s why you have to pay attention to the little things.

Now, I honestly don’t know why any of the following suggestions are like same-sex marriage, but I don’t really know why the old, cliched ones are either. I trust the pundits to figure out tenuous-but-alarming links for me. That’s pretty much their job anyway, right? So, without further ado…

Gay marriage is really like:

• Wearing sunglasses indoors.
• Letting Michael Bay marry explosions!
• The part in The Labyrinth when David Bowie turns into an owl.
• Impaling babies on narwhal tusks.
• Kicking the tires of a new car just because you’ve seen other people do it, but not really knowing what anyone gets out of it.
• Marrying cancer.
• Buzkashi, the cut-throat game of goat dragging.
• Riding a fixed-gear bicycle.
• Destroying all the cookies in the world.
• Licking doorknobs when you’ve got a cold and you know you’re still contagious.
• Throwing monkeys into turbine jet engines.
• Being in love with just, you know, being in love, man.
• Giving America AIDS.

I hope this gives the anti-gay marriage activists some new material to work with. You really need to flood the airwaves with as many of these comparisons as possible or people will start conflating gay marriage with marriage marriage, possibly at some point dropping the “gay” qualifier. That would obviously be disastrous to someone. I’m just not positive whom.

But I don’t want to see that tired bestiality thing trotted out yet again, okay guys? You’re better than that.

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* No.

If you verbally abuse someone, I don’t trust you. If you break things in anger, especially to intimidate or otherwise send a message to your partner, I don’t trust you. You can say it a million times: “I would never raise a hand against anyone!” “I’m not the violent type.” “I know not to cross the line.” Yeah, sorry. I still don’t trust you.

When I was a kid, no one sat me down to lay out the List of Unacceptable Behaviors. I honestly didn’t know that breaking things and punching holes in walls right next to me were red flag activities. I thought that if a guy didn’t hurt me, I wasn’t really allowed to complain. I didn’t understand that when a partner takes steps to try to isolate you from your friends and family, it’s time to dump the motherfucker already. If he told me he cared about me, well, that meant he did! Why would anyone bother to lie about that?

Yes, I was naive like the cosmos is big: beyond imagining.

I can’t blame anyone for my lack of education here. My parents certainly didn’t expect their daughter to find herself in an abusive relationship as a teenager (or ever, probably). In fact, I’m sure they thought I’d meet a nice Christian boy who would agree with my dad and treat me like a treasured helpmeet, and we’d get married young (the most reliable way to prevent premarital sex) and bless them richly with WASP grandbabies approximately nine months after I finally discovered on my wedding night what a penis looked like. They may or may not have also expected me to learn to speak in tongues, but this was merely implied, never discussed.

But despite my parents’ peculiar and inaccurate prophesies concerning my romantic future, I think they were deceptively typical: few parents want to plan for the worst, and perhaps fewer see the looming specter of an asshole on the horizon. I wonder how many parents ever give the List Of Unacceptable Behaviors talk.

Do people pick the list up from pop culture, peers, mentors, or their own common sense (of which I’ve never claimed adequate amounts)? The chilling answer is that far too few of us do until we’re taught the hard way. Far too many of us learn what’s unacceptable by accepting the unacceptable until we reach a crisis point. For me, the crisis point occurred with Reginald Sleeth after he broke things, after he called me names, after he hit me, after he choked me, after he threatened to kill me, and after so many other Fucking Well Unacceptable Behaviors.

I’m not a therapist or any other kind of expert in abusive relationships, but I have spent a lot of time processing and examining my experiences and the stories of other abused partners. Often there seems to be a pattern of escalation. An abuser might test to see if he (or yes, she) can get away with throwing something across the room so it almost hits his victim. If he liked the response from that, he might smash something right next to her, seeming almost about to strike her with it, and scaring her even more. After that, he might start shoving. Just a little. And so on.

The Slippery Slope is a fallacy because it does not logically follow that circumstances will inevitably escalate. But neither does not logically follow that an argument’s automatically invalid if it notes a process of escalation. When a person self-justifies abusive actions shrewd to provoke fear and grant him control over someone, he can’t be trusted to adhere to higher frequencies on an honor code spectrum he’s already breaking. Not all verbal abusers and object-violent abusers graduate to hitting their victims. But many do, and those who don’t are still abusive and still patently Unacceptable. And if no one’s ever told you that before, I’m damn well telling you now.

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