Take my wife, please
I was unwinding recently from an amazing hot-oil rubdown from Scott Lively, membership director of the Oregon’s Citizen’s Alliance, when it came up again. Gay marriage. I can’t escape it. Everywhere I go, people are talking about it. Charles Barkley is for it. The Catholics are against it. The Massachusetts Supreme Court is for it. The Massachusetts legislature is against it. San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom is for it and the White House is searching it for weapons of mass destruction. (Oh! I found a missile.) It’s a hot issue and with the upcoming elections, I’m sure it’s not going anywhere anytime soon. But realistically, why do so many people care?
It was really the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruling, that nowhere in the state constitution is anything forbidding gay unions, which set everything off. The Massachusetts legislature fruitlessly scrambled to put an amendment defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman into the works. George W. fumbled his way through yet another speech, expressing the same thing. Bigots and assholes came out of the woodwork to monosyllabically express their narrow-minded opposition to the ruling. And happy, loving same-sex couples quietly made their way to the Northeast, to have something they’d never been allowed before.
I don’t understand opponents of gay marriage. First they complain that homosexual promiscuity is undermining American values. Now they’re complaining that homosexual monogamy is undermining American values. Make up your damn mind! How am I supposed to protect American values, when I don’t even know what’s threatening them?
Besides, I’d much rather live next door to a committed same-sex couple than, say, floppy-boob divorc퀌�e Janet Jackson, or Teen People slut-of-the-year divorc퀌�e Britney Spears. Why should the Queen of Pop be allowed to get all drunk, marry up with ex-Seinfeld fatty Jason Alexander, and divorce him hours later when homosexual couples are not?
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The backlash is expected, of course, and gay rights activists are prepared. Just because the Supreme Court ruled against segregation in Brown vs. the Board of Education, the United States didn’t become an immediate rainbow-colored paradise. The battle for civil rights is an ongoing daily struggle, but for homosexual proponents, it’s a battle worth fighting. And things are looking up.
In spite of relatively strong language from state and national institutions against gay marriage, there are public officials fighting the good fight. New San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom ordered city officials to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples last week, in bold opposition to California state laws forbidding it. Volunteers worked through the weekend to unite more than 1,700 loving couples in the bonds of holy matrimony, and despite opposition from the gap-toothed oakies in the San Francisco Superior Court and the Arizona-based Alliance Defense Fund, even more marriage certificates will be issued today.
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I just hope gay couples know what they’re up against. Marriage isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Cheating on your significant other is one thing, but when you’re married it becomes adultery. At least that’s what my wife keeps yelling.
Realistically, why would anyone want to get married? It’s an institution based in the puritanical dogma of the very people who oppose the gay right to it. Getting married is just another way of giving control of your life over to ‘the man.” No more all-day coke binges, no more cruising around town in limos filled with cross-dressing strippers, no more late night, innuendo filled, chit-chat about Ding Dongs and cream-filled Twinkies with Margie at the Plaid Pantry. No more fun. So while I am a firm supporter of the right to same sex marriages, I’m giving the whole U.S. gay community the same advice my dad gave me on my wedding night.
Run. Run for your goddamn life.
