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Oh, how I’ll rant about the outdated institution, it’s connection to rigid gender roles and boring church services.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.