Be Gay and Say I DO

We are pretty deep in organizing the Unmarriage for Gaymarriage event on the 14th, and I want to air some concerns. We have come late to the whole question of gay marriage in part because so many of our gay and lesbain friends express their own qualms about it being the wrong thing at the time, or not really the thing they would go for right now, their argument summed up in the hetero-normative question. Something like: Marriage is something that straight people do, so why would gay people even want to get married, and won't legalizing gay marriage force more and more gay people to mimic straight people to be accepted. There are others who tell us we should abandon marriage completely because of what it has meant to women through the ages, that it has been a property law, a tool of oppression and a way to sequester women in the roles of wife and mother and that expending activist energy on such a bankrupt institution is a waste.

Okay the point, just to be clear, is not that anyone should have to get married just that they should be able to get married to who they want to marry if they want to get married to who they want to marry. Secondly we all know there are incredible rights and privilege that go along with being married, and regardless of "marriage" all of them must be accorded to partnerships hetero or homo. I  know neither of these address the much deeper problem, that discrimination against our LGBTI fellows will only end when we stop fearing otherness, not because we make the other less other.

I really care that my lesbian friend can go visit her partner of 14 years in the hospital without a hassle, or that the children they raised together won't suddenly be whisked off to a fundamentalist Christian grandparents house if she dies etc.. and yes, in some places the laws already support those kinds of things, but not everywhere and can i tell you how easy it was for me and William to get those privileges? Really easy. All we had to do is get married. It took us about 20 minutes. In most places getting divorced is harder than getting married. Its all much easier than trying to prove domestic partnership or adopt each others kids...Or how about our immigrant LGBTI friends who have to leave the country even though they have long term partners here... There are just alot of good reasons why same sex marriage has to be recognized. Politically. Legally. Morally.

On the "all marriage is bullshit because its about property and oppression" front well....for the moment I'll just keep it personal. I really like being married to Billy. Being married helps us. We are both explosive, wild crazy people and the covenant is like a container, a place for us to coexist. I also really loved making vows to each other in front of our community, and in hard times I remember those vows, the faces of people witnessing them. Do we need to be married to be together? I don't know. Would we have broken up if we weren't married? I dont' know.

Do I feel like "property" because I am married? Does my marriage "oppress" me? I don't think so, or I should say no more than other intimate relationships have oppressed me, sure sometimes its claustrophobic, sometimes its painful but not more than my relationships with my sisters, my mother (I'll leave my father out of it because I am also his property by these standards of marriage, passed to my husband on my wedding day). We try to pay attention to how normalized sexism is, we talk about it openly and mind the minutiae.

So I believe in marriage to some degree, and at the very least I believe in my marriage. Its not that I think people must get married in order to be whole people but hey I got to CHOOSE to get married, and everyone should have that choice.

I just got an email from a wonderful man in California named Marc,
What think you?