"Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast"
-Oscar Wilde		 Brilliant at Breakfast title banner "The liberal soul shall be made fat, and he that watereth, shall be watered also himself."
-- Proverbs 11:25
"...you have a choice: be a fighting liberal or sit quietly. I know what I am, what are you?" -- Steve Gilliard, 1964 - 2007

"For straight up monster-stomping goodness, nothing makes smoke shoot out my ears like Brilliant@Breakfast" -- Tata

"...the best bleacher bum since Pete Axthelm" -- Randy K.

"I came here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum." -- "Rowdy" Roddy Piper (1954-2015), They Live
Thursday, October 26, 2006

At last, a reason to be proud to live in New Jersey
Posted by Jill | 5:27 AM
...Or at least somewhat less ashamed.

I've long felt that the answer to the "gay marriage" semantics issue is for the government to get out of the "marriage" business entirely.

Marriage has two components: the legal, sanctioned-by-government one, which the NJ State Supreme Court said yesterday may not be granted in a discriminatory way so as to include gay couples; and the religious one. The law doesn't distinguish between the two, and calls both "marriage". So if you were married by a clergyman deputized by the state to perform what it calls "marriage", it's the same as if you were married by a judge, or at City Hall, or by a captain of a ship. The Catholic church and other religious organizations may not recognize civil marriages like mine, but the five-minute, largely self-written civil ceremony that Mr. Brilliant and I participated in 20 years ago is regarded by society-at-large as marriage.

Perhaps that's the problem. Or perhaps we need to tell these religious organizations who don't regard me as married either that it's none of their damn business.

This argument that same-sex marriage somehow "threatens marriage" is ridiculous. I am still married nearly a year and a half after attending a gay wedding. I haven't felt "threatened" for one minute because my friends chose to make a lifetime commitment. The very notion that gay marriage should be called something else is simply semantics.

The obvious answer is for the government to get out of the marriage business entirely, and call what it does "granting civil unions". That means that couples like Mr. Brilliant and I are "civilly united", and so are the Messrs. ModFab, Jay and Greg, Shelly and Jen, and all the other gay couples who have managed to live together for longer than many hetero couples and the world hasn't come to an end.

The problem is that just as with the rest of this silly society we live in, where we are unable to acknowledge difference among people because of this compulsion we have to rank things and the characteristics of white, hetersexual males always seem to rank higher on the worthiness scale; as long as we give gay marriage a different name, it's always going to rank lower on the acceptability scale -- and that's just not acceptable.

It's easy for people like me, who can just go down to city hall with a birth certificate and get a piece of paper that says "Certificate of Marriage", to say "One step at a time, people just have to get used to it; the more they see that gay marriage doesn't make the world come to an end, the less opposition there will be." But what's to get used to? If we don't want the Bible-thumpers pushing their religion down our throats in any other area, why on earth should we let them do it when it comes to denying the full rights and recognition to some Americans that we do to others?

I'm sorry, but members of the political party that gave us pedophile Mark Foley, mistress-beater Don Sherwood, rape-and-death-threatener Jim Gibbons, and the rest of the perverts that comprise their ranks, have nothing to say about what threatens marriage. The best couple role model I know are the guy who does my hair and his partner. They have been together for over 30 years. They live AND work together, and they are just as solicitous and kind to each other today as they were 20 years ago when I started going to their shop. How many Republican politicians and so-called evangelical Christians can say the same?

THIS is one reason why it's important:


0 comments
Bookmark and Share