It isn't about the wedding.
I have bad relations with weddings. I've just never gotten it. I once wore a black dress, black stockings and too much makeup to what turned out to be an outdoor, summer, morning wedding in Tucson. I looked like the Wicked Witch melting to the tune of Pachbel's "Canon in D".
I cut my own hair—butchered it—just hours prior to being the maid of honor at my sister's wedding. We have the proud pictures to prove it. And I've flubbed innumerable wedding gifts—once, I gave the happy couple a CD.
I'm equally as bad at funerals and baby showers, but that's another story. The point is, it's not about the ceremony.
I talk about this all the time with my should-be spouse in our home here in the marriage capital of the world, where we plot to destroy other people's unions with our outlandish homosexual existence. Although this morning, when we woke up, neither of us happened to be clad in a leather bustier, hanging from the chandelier, planning to force our sex life onto the world. As I recall, I turned off the alarm, and we lay there quietly. Kristen said, "Let's sleep five more minutes." I thought, God, I love her.
We are clearly about to overthrow the nation. But first, we take turns showering, make coffee, feed the cats, kiss each other goodbye and head off to work. Maybe the critics of gay unions are right—this kind of love, commitment and monotony may indeed ruin America. That's why gentle souls are saying things like this all over the media right now: "You can put them [gay people] all on an island and drop a bomb on it for as much as I care," said Dorian Van Zant, a resident of Oakley, California, in the San Francisco Chronicle.
"We consider homosexuality in this country terrorism," said Charles Lee, Houston Texas Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, in an Associated Press story. "And the reason we consider it terrorism is it is a destruction of our future."
One night as we sat on the sofa together watching My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiance, a show in which a woman is paid half a million bucks to lie to her family about her desire to marry a rude man she has just met, I asked Kristen—my committed partner of five years—"Are you trying to destroy America's future?"
"No," she said.
"Good. Me neither."
For a long time, I kept quiet on this issue because I have had doubts about the merits of the institution of marriage. It seems an odd place for government to be: endorsing love relationships. I've spent a lifetime trying to avoid interaction with bureaucracy. I find it ironic that the very people who favor limited government could support the state endorsement of something as ethereal—and personal—as love.
Worst of all, the debate over same-sex marriage is fueled by conservative politicos to drive to the polls people whom they believe are too dense to understand more complicated political issues. The whole thing is insulting to voters, but it worked in Nevada a few years ago for Richard Ziser and the Coalition for the Protection of Marriage, and a mess of conservatives, including President Bush, is betting it will work again this year.
But preventing gay people from marrying won't do anything to improve this nation, or this community, or their own marriages. It's like saying that preventing blue cars from driving in the right lane will bring world peace. Nevertheless, here they are, rallying bullies around discrimination at the expense of a small minority of people with limited voting power, to distract from broader public policy failures: jobs, health care, foreign policy.
This issue is not, nor has it ever been, about "protecting" marriage. Were that the case, reasonable people would draft legislation to punish married heterosexuals for adultery, or require counseling prior to marriage and prior to divorce.
But on the sweeping canvas of political apathy that is our country, it is preferable to support something that requires no change in one's own behavior. When, in fact, a "moral" issue comes along that affords the lazy a chance to feel involved merely by shoving their index finger at someone else, we have what we call wholesome family-oriented voters.
Marriage as an institution between a man and woman is above reproach. I am reminded of this when I hear about the Riviera's 1,000 $5 casino chips that commemorate divorce. They read: "I got custody of the dog in 2003."
And so it goes. Millions of amoral, apolitical, apathetic people, divorced people, adulterers; people who allow or secretly partake in prostitution; people who cheat on their taxes, overcharge for services, fail to volunteer; people who move their companies' factories out of the nation to better exploit a cheaper work force, search for tax loopholes, ignore the elderly, trash the environment, walk past a hungry person, let poor children go unattended, refuse to fund better education, ship the homeless out of town and consume millions of dollars more in food than is their share of the world's supply while others literally starve to death all over the globe—these people take offense because I am in love with a woman and we would like our committed union to be treated equally under law.
Sometimes, it's too beautiful a farce to be angry about.
It's 2000, and there's someone ringing the doorbell. I've got my hands in dishwater, domestic crackerjack that I am. Kristen is still at work. It takes me a few minutes to get to the door, what with the mop and the vacuum cleaner in my path. When I do open it, I find a flier asking me to vote yes on Question 2, to protect marriage from homosexuals. I am perturbed that someone has come to our door, in our yard—into our life—to speak out against us. I walk outside and look down the street to see who has left it, rage growing.
It is a woman with a baby in a stroller. A neighbor.
I go back inside. I'm pissed. And sad.
We don't hang a gay flag from our front porch; we don't push our politics in our neighborhood. We're pretty quiet, actually. People probably assume we're straight. Maybe that's not a good thing, I think. Maybe I need to put a big sign on my door that says, "Lesbians Live Here."
Josh Loehr and his partner went to the Clark County Marriage Bureau on the Friday before Valentine's Day to participate in Freedom to Marry Week, a gay-rights initiative they read about in the Las Vegas Bugle. Schoolteachers who have been together for six years, the couple moved here from South Bend, Indiana, 18 months ago, after checking to see whether this state has a law preventing employment discrimination against homosexual people. (It does.)
"We stood in line and … filled out the applications and presented them," Loehr told me. "And the woman behind the counter said, "Oh, these are for two males?"' and we said, 'Yes' and she said, 'I'm sorry we can't do that.' So I said, 'Why not?" and she said, 'Because it's against the law.'"
Loehr and his partner asked to see a supervisor. They were told to wait in a hallway and, he said, when the media began snapping photos, the official at the marriage bureau started to close the door to prevent publicity.
"I said to them, 'I would prefer to have the door open, rather than closed,' so she went back to her office," Loehr said. "There was symbolism there."
Ultimately, though, they were sent away with a supervisor's business card—and the door was closed.
Kristen and I have watched as several of our heterosexual friends have fallen in love and gotten married, and we have happily attended their weddings and sincerely wished them well, time and time again. We attend these functions as a couple. Our friends know us and respect us as a couple. But the laws of the state and the nation to which we pay taxes do not. At the end of our lives, one of us will not collect Social Security spousal death benefits despite the fact that we are spending a lifetime paying into that system. We do not have the right to inherit without a will, as our married friends do. I do not have the right to make decisions for Kristen in a medical emergency. I would have to stand by while her family in another state is tracked down. She does not have the right to be by my side were I in the hospital. Were one of us to die, the other would have no say in funeral arrangements, nor in the disposition of the other's belongings.
Some of these situations can be remedied by hiring an attorney and having documents drawn up and handy in the case of an emergency. That's not free. We must pay out of pocket for our rights, in addition to paying our taxes that go to covering the rights of heterosexual couples.
There are at least 1,049 protections, benefits and responsibilities extended to married couples under federal law, according to a 1997 study by the General Accounting Office.
To preclude homosexual couples from those privileges is a blatant violation of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which forbids states to "deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of its laws." That amendment was the core of the argument in Loving v. Virginia in 1967, in which the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Virginia's ban on interracial marriages.
But the reason the right to marry matters goes beyond the legal ramifications. There are social implications of marriage that matter, although many times I wish it weren't so.
Marriage is a basic part of our country's civic life, even if in Vegas it's peddled like escort services. For better or worse, marriage is viewed by some as a rite of passage, a milestone by which young, oat-sowing adults move into maturity and settle down, start a career, devote themselves to their spouse and family and become more stable and active members of community. Rightly or wrongly, marriage is regarded by some as a stamp of progress in one's life, an achievement of which we are to be proud—thus the celebration and the congratulations—an indication that two people have closed one chapter and opened another.
It is illogical and counterproductive to accuse gay people of being promiscuous and our relationships of being less-than-sincere and then forbid us from entering into the institution allegedly meant to encourage monogamy and focus on family.
Gaining the right to legally marry is also about gaining equality among our peers, our colleagues, our neighbors. It's about kids growing up knowing that gay couples are as loving and committed as straight couples, and respecting them and their union the way that they would respect heterosexual married couples.
This is not encouraging kids to be gay, as some opponents of gay marriage apparently fear. I was encouraged to be straight, as were most gay people, if not by our parents than by a society that up until recent years offered few openly gay public figures. But I am gay nonetheless. That isn't going to change. The variable isn't gayness, it's how healthy and productive we can be as gay people; how connected we can be to the larger society; how unhindered by being different and how focused on being functioning members of a functioning community we can be. By marginalizing a group of adults that is equal in every way, you have succeeded in doing nothing but creating another marginalized group—and a bitter divide, an unnecessary polarization of insiders and outsiders, and the problems that often arise therein. Who wins in this? Precluding gay people from mainstream social institutions does not prevent homosexuality, nor protect people from their irrational fears. It creates hostility.
And what are those fears? Why would someone else's sexuality constitute a threat? I can only assume that there is an irrational fear that gay people are predatory. I have heard people incorrectly, offensively, associate homosexuality with pedophilia. This indicates a lack of understanding of the problem of pedophilia. In 2002, a study by the Child Molestation Research and Prevention Institute, a nonprofit organization aimed at eliminating child victimization through education and support of families, found that 99 percent of pedophiles are men and the number of girl victims is more than twice the number of boy victims. Also, of those predators who molested boys, 53 percent also molested girls. It is unrelated to homosexuality except by irrational hypothesis.
Some opponents of gay marriage say that they simply want to protect states from the whims of other states or judges. The point is well taken. This is about states' rights to the degree that the Civil War or the civil rights movement was about states' rights. We have had the costly opportunity to learn and hopefully have not failed to learn that there are some principles that are a part of our national fiber—our humanity—that unite us: that all people are created equal and deserve equal protection under law. The fact that Nevada and a few other states have altered their constitutions to actively deny one segment of the population equal treatment under the law will ultimately reflect poorly on Nevada. To wit, it wasn't until 2000 that Alabama voters removed laws against interracial marriage from the state constitution—and that was with 40 percent voting to keep the law on the books. Sometimes social progress, particularly in the cases of minority groups, must come from somewhere other than legislative pathways. We can only hope the nation doesn't move to amend the U.S. Constitution in a manner that regresses the nation.
The other day, as I ate Eggos and read the paper and sorted through the daily affronts to my very being, I decided to put the newspaper down and call pastor Dave Krueger-Duncan of Northwest Community Church for some reinforcement. He had written an editorial in the Bugle emphasizing the idea that separate is not equal. I didn't know anything about him except that he leads a church that welcomes gay people as well as straight people and is himself straight. I was intrigued by his adamant stance against civil unions and in favor of same-sex marriage.
"I perceive that the gay community is restricted into certain behavioral ghettos," he told me.
"The invisible ghetto is where some [gay] people go when they go to work. In this ghetto are people who have 'roommates' instead of lovers. They don't make a lot references to their dates—they fly under the radar ...
"The second ghetto I call the Mardi Gras ghetto, and this is where you go when you get away from your bread and butter—you throw away all restraints and cast off the invisibility …
"The bigoted majority really like to cultivate these ghettos. The first encourages the belief that there are very, very few gay people, and the second that gay people are outrageous and aberrant and angry, and so they have every reason to protect their children from you. Both are of course wrong."
Krieger says that these ghettos—places where people go to feel safe—are created by social pressures and threatening outside environments. While he understands, he says, that it's logical for gay people to take the safe road in one of these two ghettos, there is a huge need to develop the middle ground.
"Where is the gay or lesbian person whose orientation is both evident and ordinary? Where are the gay or lesbian couples who are embraced as any other newlyweds?"
And that's when it crystallizes in my head. I'd been struggling to get a grip on the full reason that the same-sex marriage issue matters so much, knowing that it isn't limited to the strictures of legal documents or even the rite of passage. It's about bridging that gap between invisibility and extremism. It's about recognizing gay people not only as Queer Eye guys or in gay clubs and gay parades, but in day-to-day, common relationships. Although Mayor Oscar Goodman has been an appreciated supporter of the gay community in many regards, I was disappointed when he said he does not support same-sex marriages. It doesn't suffice to support our bars and not our marriages—what does that do to a community?
I've wanted to be measured and good humored about all of this. Actually, my natural tendency is to want to stay out of the fray. In fact, I wanted to avoid writing this essay.
But I got really tired of waking up and seeing stories about people being "accused" of having a homosexual agenda like it would be a crime (Review-Journal, February 25), and of bigots all over the nation coming out to protest our personal relationships, and of reading quotes like those by the woman in Oakley who would happily eradicate us, and so the other day when I heard someone casually saying this about the couples on the courthouse steps in San Francisco, "It's not like all these gay couples were just waiting to get married," I wasn't feeling terribly good-humored anymore.
We've been waiting our entire lives to shed the stigma that is manifested in laws such as the heterosexuals-only marriage laws.
And what percentage of heterosexual adults are married? More than half. And what makes anyone think a similar percentage of gay people wouldn't be wanting to get married? The numbers that we've seen are not by a long shot comparable yet to the percentage of heteros who've chosen to be married. Of course it is also for political effect—a meaningful effect, not a lark.
Judge Jeffrey Amestoy of the Vermont Supreme Court Judge wrote in his opinion affirming gay unions that "the extension of the Common Benefits Clause to acknowledge plaintiffs as Vermonters who seek nothing more, nor less, than legal protection and security for their avowed commitment to an intimate and lasting human relationship is simply, when all is said and done, a recognition of our common humanity."
It's about so much more than a ceremony.
And thank God for that. Because in the back of my mind, I fear the ceremony. I flash back to every wedding I've ever attended in which I did something quite at odds with Miss Manners. I'm not a planner. I'm not a hostess. I dislike pomp and circumstance. I'm rarely comfortable with being the center of attention. I never know what to wear. I'm sure I would fall or freeze or have a giant rip in whatever garment I chose.
But I'm in love. And I can't think of anything more worthy of taking risks for.