Gay Marriage? Absolutely!

This is not an essay full of facts and figures. If you want to read up on the history of marriage and its long legacy of discrimination against one kind of people or another, you'll have to go elsewhere. What you're going to get here is a piece of my mind, straight from my heart.

Actually, I doubt if anything coming from my heart can be very straight, since I'm bisexual. However, I promise you that this essay will be gut-level honest, no holds barred. I may be criticized for saying all the things I'm about to say, but that's too bad, because there's a horrible abuse of privilege going on in relation to marriage, and it makes me sick.

The truth is, I think it is sick that here in the United States, gay marriage is not a federally protected right. This is bigotry, pure and simple, and it needs to stop. Denying two women or two men the right to marry is as cruel and absurd as it was to deny two straight people of different races the right to marry.

In my home state (Washington), legislators in 1998 passed the highly redundant and incredibly homophobic "Defense of Marriage Act," which outlaws marriage between two people of the same sex (this was already illegal in Washington). Personally, I think they should have called this law the "Denial of Marriage Act," since it denies roughly ten percent of the population the right to enjoy the legal privileges accorded to the other ninety percent.

Maybe I'm missing something, but doesn't the Constitution of the United States guarantee everyone the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Seems to me that this guarantee alone should be enough to legitimatize gay marriage, since it's mighty hard to feel very free (liberty) if you don't have the right to marry the person you love (the pursuit of happiness).

Marriage as an Institution

Since I'm arguing for the expansion of marriage rights, it may surprise you to know that I'm no big fan of marriage. As a woman who has been married and divorced twice, and who has since enjoyed a long-term partnership with a man (since 1987), I tend to share Mae West's infamous take on marriage: "Marriage is a great institution, but I'm not ready for an institution yet."

Aside from my personal bias, I must also confess that in my longtime practice as a professional counselor, I've rarely seen marriage improve a relationship. I've seen a number of healthy relationships stay strong and vibrant after marriage; I've just rarely seen marriage actually improve a relationship.

Unfortunately, I have seen numerous couples hit the skids or "go on automatic" at some point after they invite the institution of marriage into their lives. Of course, there's no telling what would have happened if these people hadn't gotten married, since there are no control groups in human life. However, most people underestimate the extraordinary power of marriage, with all its socioeconomic and religious underpinnings, not to mention its intergenerational family legacies.

Marriage brings with it a whole gamut of personal and collective hopes, dreams, fears, and expectations. Anyone who doesn't think so has probably never been married, or may simply be oblivious (perhaps blissfully so) to the complex inner workings of this ancient institution.

Meat to the Lions and a Circus of Laws

One of my spiritual teachers (a woman) said that marriage is "like meat to the lions." That's a pretty intense statement, so I've thought about it a lot over the years. One thing I've realized is that the State sanctions marriage in order to control people's lives in various ways for the benefit of society (e.g., to oversee the welfare of "legitimate" children, or to regulate property ownership and the dispersal of assets after death).

Some would argue — perhaps rightfully so — that marriage isn't only for the benefit of society, but also for the benefit of its participants. For example, in most American states, only legally married couples are allowed to pass along Social Security benefits to their partners. There are also more than a thousand other benefits assigned automatically through the act of marriage. Thus, unmarried couples — whether gay or straight — are penalized in numerous ways by current marriage laws in the United States.

If government-sanctioned marriage did not exist, people would probably need to be more proactive in regard to financial rights and responsibilities. This would mean that domestic partners would need to draw up legal documents to protect their financial and medical interests, as well as to specify their personal wishes related to other important matters of life and death.

Frankly, I think it would be much simpler to make this documentation a matter of personal responsibility for individual couples, instead of leaving it to the mercy of our country's current circus of laws surrounding marriage, community property, child custody, and estate dispersal. In other words, I wish the government would stay out of the marriage bed.

When I was a child, I assumed I'd get married, because that's what most people did in my generation. Once I left that kind of automatic thinking behind, however, I came to believe that this country's laws about the separation of Church and State should also apply to marriage. To me, marriage is an affair of the heart, and I don't think the State has any business regulating affairs of the heart.

Given the complexity of human life in current time, it's understandable that unions between partners require some level of government regulation. Even so, I'd rather do away with State-sanctioned marriage altogether and make all unions be civil unions. This would leave the issue of marriage to religion, thus keeping the separation of Church and State clear and strong.

Various churches could then be inclusive or exclusive in regard to marriage, according to their collective level of enlightenment (or lack thereof). Anyone could choose to marry or not as desired, and every union--regardless of whether or not marriage is also involved--would be accorded all the rights and responsibilities that are now awarded only to State-sanctioned marriages.

I acknowledge that my perspective about marriage and civil unions is still the minority position in the United States. I think this is changing fast, and I look forward to the day when this article can be removed from my Web site!

At this point, I'll return to my defense of gay marriage, now that you know it's not so much marriage itself I'm defending, but every adult's right to marry, regardless of sexual orientation.

The Privilege of Choice

Although my overall network of friends includes a variety of sexual orientations, my close inner circle is noticeably underpopulated by heterosexuals. I didn't plan it this way. In fact, I never really paid much attention to it until I started thinking about writing this article many years ago.

Here's the breakdown of my current circle of close friends: I'm bisexual and I'm partnered with a straight man. My best woman friend is also bisexual, and she's in a long-term relationship with a woman. My closest male friend is gay, and he's in a long-term relationship with a man. Of three other close women friends, one is lesbian and partnered for 19 years, and the other two are straight and currently unattached. That makes three heterosexuals out of a total of ten people.

This means that if you consider my inner circle of friends and their partners, three straight people and two bisexuals have the right to marry the lover of their choice — but we bisexuals have this right only if we choose partners of the opposite sex. The two of us who are bisexual, along with the other five who are gay or lesbian, cannot legally marry someone of the same sex. This is obviously not an equitable situation.

I realize that the percentage of non-heterosexual people in my inner circle of friends doesn't fit the statistical norm. However, I think I can safely say that my friends and I all consider ourselves "normal" and most definitely believe that each of us deserves the same rights as everyone else. Ironically, and perhaps understandably, it is my gay and lesbian friends who would like to be married. My partner and I want no part of it, and my other close women friends who are straight are happily single right now.

This brings me to the crux of the matter: It's a much different issue to choose not to be married if you have the choice! That's the nature of privilege: It allows you to say yes or no to something because the choice is a given. My gay and lesbian friends don't have this privilege, and frankly, I think that's deplorable. I don't know how anyone can be so arrogant as to deny other adults the right to make a family — in every sense of the word, including legally — with whomever they choose.

A Call for Well-Lit Minds

I wish that for one year, every homophobe, every anti-gay legislator, and every one-way religious fundamentalist would be required to experience, firsthand, what many homosexuals experience, to some degree, every day of every year: intolerance, ridicule, hatred, and socio-economic discrimination based on sexual orientation.

Perhaps if the roles were reversed, homophobic people could get a taste of their own oppression and find out how it feels to get dirty looks because you're one of them, how it feels to be disowned by your parents because your lover doesn't fit their profile, how it feels to be denied child custody rights because of your sexual identity, how it feels to be denied access to a dying partner in the hospital because you're not legally married, or how it feels to be fired from your job — despite workplace protection laws — because coworkers are "uncomfortable" around you.

The brutality of discrimination is pervasive. Sometimes the situation seems hopeless to me, since I know that bigots rarely turn into icons of acceptance overnight, and in fact, may never soften their stance at all. However, something inside me refuses to give up on even the most diehard homophobes, because I believe that somewhere in their hearts lies a nugget of gold, a cache of compassion trapped inside an icy envelope of fear. You just never know what stroke of luck, what kiss of kindness, what twist of fate might serve to melt that icy envelope.

Some day — and I hope it's soon — homophobes and bigots won't be running the show, and their prejudices can then be entertained and accepted as merely one position among many, rather than the dominant paradigm. After all, even homophobia must make sense somehow within the convoluted framework of the minds that give rise to it.

Unfortunately, these minds may not be very well lit. The point is, well-lit minds are inclusive, not exclusive, because it is the nature of light to shine equally on all things and all people. Therefore, dimly lit minds should not be sitting in legislatures and deciding the fate of millions of ordinary citizens who simply want the freedom to love, cherish, and legally commit to whomever they choose.

When my gay and lesbian friends can marry, and when people like me can walk either side of our bisexuality with impunity, then I will stop writing about this cruel denial of rights. Until then, I'll add my voice to the fray.

Resource: drcat.org