It was really hard for me to decide to get married, legally, in California. It kept coming up for me that if my partner had been only slightly different, genetically, it would have been illegal, and that felt wrong. We had decided to wait until it was legal, and if we had been unmarried in February, we would have been in line with everybody else at City Hall.
It wasn't until I sat down with a friend who is both a fine and excellent pragmatist, and partnered with somebody of the same sex, that I was able to justify it, to myself, enough to feel completely comfortable. I'll tell you some of his argument (he was for us getting married, one hundred percent).
For one thing, giving up my rights doesn't give other people rights. What gives other people rights is having people who have those rights fight for them, too. It's one thing to make an open and visible protest, to send letters and money and donate time and so forth, but to make a silent protest like not getting married because gay people can't -- all the politicians will see is that just about everybody getting married is anti-equality, and that will reinforce their beliefs.
Second, there were a lot of reasons why I should marry, but one of the big ones was to tilt the wealth equation in favour of people who favour equal human rights. Marriage consolidates wealth, and if only anti-equality people marry, they will tend to be more wealthy and more powerful than pro-equality people, and wealth, as we know, is power.
Having pro-equality people marry and get wealthy and then use that wealth to enforce their world view the way anti-equality people do is the only way things around going to change. Pro-equality people should gang together and make pro-equality churches, pro-equality school boards, pro-equality parents' committee for moral values (pro-equality moral values, not fake moral values centered around voyeurism).
I don't think straight marriage boycotts help the gay marriage cause. They help people feel better when they're smarting from having been smacked around by the media in the past few months as if somehow being gay made John Kerry lose the election, and that's not a minor thing, but they really don't bring us any closer to equality.
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2004-12-14 17:11 (UTC)It wasn't until I sat down with a friend who is both a fine and excellent pragmatist, and partnered with somebody of the same sex, that I was able to justify it, to myself, enough to feel completely comfortable. I'll tell you some of his argument (he was for us getting married, one hundred percent).
For one thing, giving up my rights doesn't give other people rights. What gives other people rights is having people who have those rights fight for them, too. It's one thing to make an open and visible protest, to send letters and money and donate time and so forth, but to make a silent protest like not getting married because gay people can't -- all the politicians will see is that just about everybody getting married is anti-equality, and that will reinforce their beliefs.
Second, there were a lot of reasons why I should marry, but one of the big ones was to tilt the wealth equation in favour of people who favour equal human rights. Marriage consolidates wealth, and if only anti-equality people marry, they will tend to be more wealthy and more powerful than pro-equality people, and wealth, as we know, is power.
Having pro-equality people marry and get wealthy and then use that wealth to enforce their world view the way anti-equality people do is the only way things around going to change. Pro-equality people should gang together and make pro-equality churches, pro-equality school boards, pro-equality parents' committee for moral values (pro-equality moral values, not fake moral values centered around voyeurism).
I don't think straight marriage boycotts help the gay marriage cause. They help people feel better when they're smarting from having been smacked around by the media in the past few months as if somehow being gay made John Kerry lose the election, and that's not a minor thing, but they really don't bring us any closer to equality.