How stupid are you?

OK, let’s just be out front with it…what is wrong with being gay? And what is wrong with gay people getting married? I pride myself on being a reasonably intelligent, rational, logical human being but I gotta tell ya, folks, this is something I just don't get it!

A friend of mine has just announced to the world that she proposed to her girlfriend, and her proposal was accepted. Everybody is over the moon…they just set a date and congratulations are flying thick and fast. It’s a champagne and confetti moment for us all…and yet, apparently my friend’s family is taking the news like she was announcing a funeral, not a wedding! They cannot be happy that their daughter is happy, that she has found someone to love and who loves her in return? Someone with whom she wants to spend the rest of her life? Someone who will care for her when she is sick, celebrate with her when she is happy, and just generally share her life and give it depth and meaning, colour and texture, and a rhythm to carry her through the rest of her days? What kind of parents are not ecstatic when their 35-year-old never-wed daughter finally finds “The One” and wants to settle down and make a life for herself with her beloved? I don’t get it.

In South Africa, gay marriage is legal, but much of the rest of the world lags behind in enfranchising all of their citizens in this regard. But despite the government having enfranchised us all, unfortunately not all of our citizens are so generous of spirit. It is somewhat more understandable in a place like America where homophobic hysteria is shared by government and citizen alike, but in a place sufficiently enlightened to recognize that equality under the law includes marriage, I find it rather sad that the faceless monolith that is government has more compassion and enlightenment than those whom we would expect to accept and embrace my friend and share her joy: her own family.

So what is wrong with being gay? The “it’s unnatural” argument no longer flies since intelligent vertebrates from bonobo chimps to dolphins have been observed engaging in what we would call “homosexual behaviour.” Somehow I doubt that the dolphins or the chimps (our nearest genetic relatives, BTW) find anything sinister in enjoying a sexual experience with members of either sex. I suspect they might find such concepts as marriage and monogamous, opposite-sex-only sexual relationships to be unnatural, truth be told.

You cannot argue that same-sex relationships are “against god” and expect to be taken seriously outside of the particular group with whom you share such a belief. Not only are there multiple gods worshipped on this planet, the interpretations of the pronouncements of those gods are almost as legion as our own numbers. The secular world may recognize and respect the existence of gods, their followers and their beliefs, but in no way is it beholden to them. The very act of a government adopting the tenets of one faith disenfranchises all those who do not share that faith, and with the exception of a theocracy, few governments can survive such an act: consider what would happen to America if the religious right got its way and the US government adopted a religious posture…but it adopted something other than Christianity as its touchstone. Whatever you believe your god(s) think about homosexuality, the rest of us are not beholden to it, and you simply cannot disenfranchise an entire class of people from the benefits and protections of law simply because of your personal belief. If you could, then I would have the same right to disenfranchise homophobes from certain protections of the law…say, the freedom of speech and the right to worship as they please. It is no less fair and makes no less sense.

What about the notion that some people “choose to be gay.” Well, aside from the complete ridiculousness of the whole idea…when, after all, did you “choose” to reject gayness and choose to be straight? (if you actually did, then I have some disconcerting news for you)…so what? So what if people do choose to be gay? What is wrong with that and why should people make choices about their lives according to your beliefs/attitudes/notions? You don’t have the right to tell me what job to choose, what car to choose, what colour to dye my hair, what politics to support, how many children to have, which god to worship…why on earth should you be able to dictate my choices regarding my sexuality? As long as some other person’s choice of partner is adult and consenting, what business is it of yours? (And yes, “other person” includes members of your family!) Suppose a bunch of people came to you with the demand that you give up your spouse because s/he belonged to the “wrong” religion or race or political party…wouldn’t you consider that intrusive and outrageous and completely beyond the pale? I imagine gay people have similar reactions when people of a different orientation make a similar demand. Your choice in partners is none of my business…and the choices that other people make for their partners are none of yours. So, even if people “choose” to be gay, so what?

I have heard it said that allowing gay people to marry harms the institution of marriage. Unfortunately, nobody ever seems to explain that silly notion and I, who can usually come up with good arguments for anything (I know the value of understanding the position of the opposition) am simply blank on the subject. In an era in which large numbers of people cohabit before marriage…indeed, some cohabit serially without marrying while others simply cohabit in what would once have been called a “common law marriage”... it seems peculiar that a group of people clamouring for the right to marry would be perceived as potentially destroying the institution. An objective view of the present social mores might indicate that heterosexual couples are chipping away at the institution with their willingness to forego certain legal benefits of marriage in exchange for the freedom to simply walk away from the relationship without being put through the meat grinder of divorce. By the same token, homosexual couples look more like the saviours of the institution rather than its destroyers, championing marriage in a time when their heterosexual brethren are abstaining from or abandoning it.

What is destructive about two people who marry, establish a home together and join “the system” rather than live outside it? In addition to demonstrating the desirability of marriage, gay couples gain the legal protections marriage offers without taking one thing away from heterosexual couples, from the government or the society. Indeed, their very insistence on being enfranchised points up the benefits of marriage that numerous heterosexual couples may be overlooking. What happens if an unmarried woman (straight or gay) falls desperately ill and her long-term partner and her parents are at odds over treatment options? The partner may know what she wants, but has no standing in the face of her parents, her legal next-of-kin. And suppose she dies—intestate—leaving a sizeable estate? Inheritance laws do not include unmarried partners: a spouse of just two days has more rights than a partner of twenty years. By demanding the right to marry, gay people champion the institution by demonstrating its desirability and protest their being excluded from participating in a favourable enterprise that the rest of us can freely enter at will.

I have heard a few people opine that the fundamental purpose of marriage is for the production and protection of children. This makes me laugh…loudly. First of all, given modern technology, there is no reason gay couples cannot have children if they so desire. But more importantly, this is a ridiculous definition of marriage that, if taken to heart, disenfranchises a lot more than gay couples. Infertile couples…when the infertility is confirmed as being irredeemable, should they be forced to divorce? Older couples…should my grandmother have been denied the right to marry in her 70s, after a 52 year marriage to my grandfather and subsequent widowhood? Couples who do not want children: should they be denied marriage because their love for and commitment to each other is simply not sufficient to warrant the white veil and pastel tux? Without even going into how poorly marriage protects children in a society in which 50% or more of marriages end in divorce, even if there are no other viable reasons for marriage than the production of children, gay people are perfectly capable of doing that. The “reason” just doesn’t fly.

Frankly, I cannot find a single reason…well, valid reason…to deny gay people the right to wed. And I think people who object not only to gay marriage, but homosexuality, are being exceedingly selfish in their views, attempting to force their sensibilities onto people who simply do not share them. The bottom line is that, once I am an adult, nobody has the right to dictate the choices I make in my life and nobody has the power to change who attracts me.

If I am to be true to myself, I must be myself, and in my case I was attracted to a man who, not too many years ago, I would have been prohibited by law from marrying for no other reason than his skin colour. My family would have been horrified (and possibly even hoped it was a phase I would grow out of) and they might even have boycotted my wedding. The multitude of objections that would have been offered then are echoed today in the arguments against gay marriage, but they are just as specious today as they were in the days of miscegenation and apartheid.

And they hurt. It hurts your child, your sibling, your grandchild, that your prejudices and beliefs mean more to you than their happiness. Is the happiness of your family member important to you? Will you rejoice that she has found the love of her life…or be a killjoy because the partner was not who…or what…you wanted? How selfish can you be, to spoil her happiness because she…an adult…doesn’t put your happiness ahead of her own in falling in love with the person with whom she intends to spend the rest of her days? Shame on you!

This whole issue about rights for gay people is just stupid…not because gay people do not deserve full enfranchisement but because there simply is no valid excuse to deny them. How stupid are you?

Marriage-minded

In Western cultures, for the most part we marry for love. The idea that someone else has the right to choose a spouse for us and we are honour/tradition/legally bound to marry the chosen person is outrageous to us, a clear violation of our right to self-determination.

Equally repugnant is the idea that we can be told who not to marry. It wasn’t that long ago, after all, that miscegenation laws were still on the books of many US states and that right to our freedom of choice in marriage partners was abridged. In 1958 in the state of Virginia, a black woman and her white husband were arrested in their own bedroom for living together as an interracial couple. The judge offered to suspend their sentence if they would agree to exile: they were to leave their home state of Virginia for a minimum of 25 years.

It took nearly ten years of that time for their case to come to the US Supreme Court, but in 1967 the Court ruled: “Marriage is one of the 'basic civil rights of man,' fundamental to our very existence and survival.... To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis…so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious…discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not to marry, a person…resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.”*

At the time of this ruling, 17 Southern states (all of the former slave states plus Oklahoma) still enforced miscegenation laws. After this ruling, those laws were no longer in effect and numerous states repealed them. But it took South Carolina until 1998 and Alabama until 2000 to officially amend their constitutions. The laws were repealed, but hardly by a landslide. More than 30 years after the federal government prohibited racial discrimination in marriage, 38% of voters in South Carolina and 41% of voters in Alabama were against repeal of these discriminatory statutes.

Interestingly, when we marry we accrue to ourselves and our partners a host of legal and customary rights that are not available to us when we cohabit. The “it’s just a piece of paper” argument isn’t really correct because without that maligned piece of paper, you are denied certain rights that automatically devolve onto you and your marriage partner. And while I am sure most of us do not have those rights in mind as we blissfully march down the aisle, they exist for us whether we take them into consideration at the moment we whisper “I do” or not.

As many as 1400 federal rights alone, I have heard, exist for married partners that are denied the unmarried. People who cavalierly dismiss marriage as an unnecessary formality surely have not considered the end-of-life dramas involving who is legally next-of-kin in terms of hospitalization, insurance coverage, inheritance, even custody of the body and funeral arrangements. There are immigration rights, tax benefits, Social Security, pension, child custody and spousal maintenance…hundreds upon hundreds of rights that married people have that are denied cohabiting couples, regardless of how long or heartfelt the relationship. A bride of two days has significantly more legal rights than a cohabiting partner of twenty years.

Domestic partnerships and civil unions have been suggested as a viable alternative to those who decide to live together without the benefit of marriage…either by choice or by laws that prohibit their marriage. The problem with domestic partnerships is that while they can address a few legal situations that are controlled by the state in which they register their partnership, they are denied all federal marital benefits and, if the partners are out of their home state, the protections they enjoy under that state’s domestic partnership laws are not necessarily enforceable in a neighbouring state. Imagine falling ill on holiday and finding your partner prohibited from visiting you in the hospital because your family doesn’t like him? Imagine losing your partner in an accident and suddenly finding your home invaded and picked clean by his family, the house you have called home for so long sold out from under you, maybe even your car spirited away because it was all in his name and you have no legal claim because you never bothered to get that oft disdained piece of paper?

Too often when we are in love we don’t look at the future with our eyes wide open. Paul McCartney was love-struck and, smitten, trusted that his love for Heather Mills would last a lifetime…it had with Linda Eastman, after all. Besotted, he refused to acknowledge reality and ask for a pre-nup, much to his later chagrin. In that same vein, we often overlook other practical matters when we partner up, failing to take into account the disastrous potential consequences of our failure to tidy up our relationship with all the legal bits and bobs that protect us…and our partner…in the future.

These laws exist to protect us…well, most of us. Just as Mildred and Richard Loving were denied equal protection under the law in 1958 in Virginia, so are legions of Americans being denied the same protections today in the form of laws that prevent consenting adults from entering into the protected status of marriage. A majority of their fellow citizens agreed that the Lovings should not be allowed to marry, some states even had constitutional prohibitions against such marriages.

But under US law, while states have the right to make certain laws…marriage laws in particular…for their residents, states cannot make or enforce laws that are contrary to federal law. And so, despite the constitutions of South Carolina and Alabama prohibiting interracial relationships, on that day in 1967, Mildred and Richard Loving caused interracial marriage prohibitions to be invalidated in every state in the union, regardless of whether those prohibitions were enshrined in the state constitutions or they were simply in the state’s codified body of law. Two people wrangling with one state over the right to marry the person of their choice changed the law for every person of every colour in every state of the union.

How different is this from the current flap over gay marriage? If you’ll look at the quote in the third paragraph, you probably didn’t notice that I removed the language that refers specifically to race. Doesn’t the principle hold true, whether the discriminating factor is colour, gender, or something else? The judge who exiled them, when asked to reconsider, stated “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, 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 contention, of course, was struck down by the Supreme Court as being irrelevant in the face of the rights of citizens to have equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment.

Today people argue that same sex people should not marry because physiologically, they were never intended to do so. This, of course, echoes the same specious logic used by Judge Leon Bazile above, citing God having placed the various races on different continents, with the intent to keep them separate. It takes rather a lot of hubris to speak the mind of an omnipotent, omniscient being when you are neither…how could Bazile know the mind of that omniscient being? How can we know whether or not same-gender attraction is intended or not? And who, after all, has the right to deny his neighbour the same rights he, himself, is allowed to exercise?

I have come to the conclusion that the passing of Prop 8 in California is not the disaster I initially thought it to be. While it does present an immediate setback to gay marriage in California, surely someone is going to appeal this to the US Supreme Court and test it against the Fourteenth Amendment. Bearing in mind that, in the Loving case, miscegenation laws were supported by a majority of voters in the affected states and the Supreme Court didn’t care, I think Loving v Virginia may well set the perfect precedent for not only overturning California’s proposed constitutional amendment prohibiting gay marriage, but, like the Loving case, end the discrimination nationwide.

We can only hope!

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-miscegenation_laws