Dear Friend and Reader,
There’s a great multimedia display on The New York Times website, reflecting on four years of gay marriage in Massachusetts. That, combined with Connecticut issuing its first gay marriage licenses this morning, made me feel a little better. I’m not sure if it’s the post-Obama-winning hangover, Prop 8 gloom or just PMS, but I’ve been dragging some kind of party-pooper mood around since the election, no question.
Living in New York, I’m now cuddled by four states and a country where I can legally refuse to get married or civil unioned. When I drive to the Garbage State for cheaper gas and lower taxes on clothes, when my girlfriend wants to visit her brother in Connecticut, when I finally go to Boston to visit my friend Ally, I’ll be able to say “I don’t want to get married.”
Oh, how I’ll rant about the outdated institution, it’s connection to rigid gender roles and boring church services. I’ll complain about that phenomenon where some couples merge into two different versions of the same J Crew sweater and swear, “Not me!”
Vive Le Resistance! I long for the day when I can say that across the country, when I can despise marriage as an insider, not as a jealous kid, peeking in the candy store window, claiming to have no taste for lollypops. Because being unmarried isn’t a protest if they won’t let you in in the first place.
Of course, it’s all about equal rights. Consenting adults in this country have the right to settle down, talk about their health care proxies and protect each other for the rest of their lives. Before 1967, conservatives, racists and the religious right tried to tell us that it was unnatural for white people to marry non-white people. About 16 states in the country had laws prohibiting interracial marriage (known in the legal sphere as miscegenation) before Loving vs. Virginia made it to the Supreme Court.
Irrational arguments against these couples ranged from simple distaste to Judge Bazile’s ridiculous geographic argument, which he used to exile the Lovings from Virginia: “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay and red, and He placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with His arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that He separated the races shows that He did not intend for the races to mix.”
This kind of bigotry, basically stating that it’s unnatural for two people to commit themselves to each other, is used against gay marriage today. I watched Anderson Cooper’s program on CNN a few nights ago, and he interviewed spokesmen on both sides of the issue: Dan Savage and Tony Perkins. (Click here for the video.) Perkins compared the prohibition of same-sex marriage to the prohibition of incest. He also used the slippery slope argument, which basically says that if we allow same-sex marriage, then it’s a step towards legalizing beastiality. As Madonna said, “I’ve heard it all before.”
After grabbing a couple of minutes on the phone with Eric, we agreed that this Savage-Perkins debate is an excellent example of Saturn opposite Uranus. The LGBT civil rights movement is happening now, and it’s occurring as a direct face-off between progression and the Stone Age.
For me, it’s more than the obvious civil rights issue. It’s about choice, and I can’t choose to be the gay version of Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins (20 years together, two kids, no marriage) until my less avant-garde couple friends get some legal papers to match their rings.
Our wheat grass drinking brothers and sisters in California couldn’t agree more. There are two lawsuits against Prop 8 that are headed for the courts. They’re arguing that votes to alter the constitution are for minor changes, not drastic decisions that revoke the rights of minorities. A majority vote is not enough to take away a decision that’s been made in the state supreme court.
Protests have continued loud and steadily on the west coast, with thousands of people marching in the streets. One street was shut down last Friday in San Francisco, and you can see my token SF gay Linda, in the photo above, holding the banner that stopped the cars.
This Saturday, the Prop 8 protest is going international. Join The Impact, a website devoted to equality for all, contains the details on protests in your area. My girlfriend is flying in from Ireland tomorrow, so if she’s not too jetlagged you can find me on Broadway. Please, please take your cameras with you, wherever you are, and email your pictures to editorial (at) planetwaves.net.
Yours & truly,
Rachel Asher
I know it’s serious, but you make me laugh today.
Whenever my dimentia rid Mother gets angry and agitated with me, she always says “no wonder no man ever married you.” My response, “But ma-a, you always told me how miserable you were as wife and mother.” Oh yeah, she doesn’t remember that part. How convenient.