Abstract

Marry, Marry, Quite Contrary

Gay marriage: I regard it with a mixture of fear and rage, but my initial response as it loomed up as a national issue was astonishment. Surprise overtook me because I had trusted my measurements of American society. I thought I knew its religious, social and legal values. Even the nicest and most tolerant of the people in my hometown would have responded to gay marriage as an utterly alien event. For marriage simply was the yoking of a man and a woman--a crucial part of the apparatus through which everyone traveled from birth to death. I have grown to treasure the difference that being a lesbian has made, the existential choice it has signified, the psychic and moral distance from conformity it has established. Yet even though I doubt I would ever exercise the freedom to marry, far more offensive than being called names is being told I cannot do something that other people can and most people think is a boon. Those who have proposed the flagrantly anti-gay marriage constitutional amendment, in part out of political cynicism and in part out of real hatred and fear, would assassinate the Constitution--and justify themselves by proclaiming the sanctity of a gilded portrait of marriage that is breathtakingly calculated and ahistorical, as if all marriages in all times and all places resembled that of an idealized upright Dad and an idealized loving Mom, who bear and rear virtuous children who do well on standardized tests. As I contemplate the struggle ahead--the grinding, state-by-state fight to allow same-sex marriage, to transfer a marriage license from one state to another, even to provide benefits for domestic partners; the equally fierce church-by-church fight for same-sex marriage--I feel ripples of the exhaustion.