Harry’s Freedom Foxhole - Legislating Love

Love is awesome. Love is awesome in the I-feel-like-high-fiving-strangers-and-listening-to-early-Beatles-records sense, but it’s also “awesome” in the old sense, i.e., “inspiring great apprehension or fear.” It can be a terrifying force, sweeping through your life and throwing you around like a plastic bag—all of a sudden you’re ignoring texts from your friends, ducking out of work early, driving on the highway at 3 AM thinking, “This is normal, this is fine. I’ll just call in sick tomorrow, we’ll spend the weekend in Connecticut. It doesn’t really matter if I overdraw my checking account to pay for the hotel.” Love is a hand on your heart that occasionally clenches into your fist. Compared to that, what’s marriage? A ring? A piece of paper that you get so your taxes are easier to fill out?

Everyone agrees that it’s way more than that. To conservatives who try really hard to oppose gay marriage from an intellectual standpoint that doesn’t involve outright gay bashing, marriage is an “institution” (also see “the institution of family”). They’ll usually lump in the rising numbers of single mothers and stuff like vitro fertilization in with gay marriage and get real abstract in their efforts to suggest that the consequences of gay marriage could be disastrous and far-reaching. Conservatives can’t say what those consequences will be, but they're convinced that ominous stuff is on the horizon once men who already live together and have sex and arguments become able to freely visit one another in the hospital if they get sick.

For gay people, the issue is less abstract. They want to marry because everyone else can marry, and because their minority status is pretty much based around who they love—who they’re capable of loving—the law’s acknowledgement of that love is especially important. It’s one of those issues that seems so obvious to me I can’t even understand why it’s an issue. There are a bunch of people who are discriminated against in a way that’s important (at least symbolically), and you want to keep things as they are because a) some dude in a desert wrote some shit thousands of years ago or b) you have some extremely complex philosophical justifications for objecting to anything ever changing?

Almost equally frustrating is that the government gets to validate our love. How insane is it that one sort of monogamous, consenting-adult love is more legally valid than another? At least when religious bodies were defining marriage, their discrimination made sense because everything about a religious wedding is completely crazy anyway. The guy with the weird collar marries you, you have to step on the glass to make it official, you sacrifice a goat… So, sure, why not add that “one man and one woman” stipulation on top of it all? Government, on the other hand, is at least supposed to try to be rational and not get swayed by the magical sky beings, right? So it’s pretty upsetting when North Carolina votes en masse to deny even the possibility of marriage on what amounts to religious grounds. It’s understandable—I guess—if you don’t want your mosque or Shinto temple or whatever not to marry two gay dudes, but gay dudes probably don’t want to go to your mosque anyway. To vote on a Constitutional amendment barring same-sex couples from getting a piece of paper that has nothing to do with God and not a whole lot to do with love is so vindictive it’s baffling to me. I can’t even argue against those people because I don’t understand them.

I wish the ceremonial and spiritual aspects of marriage—the ones that have to do with love and acknowledge that there’s more to getting married than agreeing to share a bank account—could get separated from something as dumb and bureaucratic as government. People could get their “certificate of union” or whatever from some shitty DMV-esque office in a process that had no romance or mystery to it, and then if they wanted to have a “wedding” ceremony to appease the gods, or just kiss in front of their families while everyone cheered, they could. It could get left to the church or those conservative intellectuals to argue about the “institution of marriage,” while government would just concern itself with “civil unions,” an annoyingly complex form that any two people could fill out if they could make it through the application process without breaking up. Meanwhile, of course, anti-gay activists would say that God doesn’t acknowledge gay civil unions, but fewer and fewer people will care what those people think.

I’m not an idiot; I know that’s never going to happen. The legal parts of marriage are going to remain mixed up with the religious parts and the ceremonial parts and the parts that have to do with love, even as those elements become increasingly separate. These stupid, ugly laws that restrict the rights of gay people because that’s what some churches preach are going to remain on the books for a while longer, because America is a horrifying place. Fortunately, it remains a place where you can love whomever you want and then have a big party and make out with your same-sex partner while everyone cheers you on. You just can’t get that piece of paper yet.

Previously - Let's Get Naked

@HCheadle