Earlier this week in Massachusetts, gay and lesbian couples, some of whom have been in committed relationships for decades, started getting married at courthouses and clerk’s offices to the cheers of onlookers. Despite the apocalyptic warnings of gay-marriage opponents, fire and brimstone did not rain down, the earth did not open up and swallow everyone whole, and predatory homosexuals did not whisper into the ears of impressionable children, “Join us, all this can be yours.” When I turned on the news, instead of moral rot and the nation going to hell in a hand basket all I saw were people who love each other very much.
Just look at Tanya McCloskey and Marcia Kadish, who got married in Cambridge shortly after the clerk’s office opened for business Monday morning. They emerged from City Hall to applause and congratulations, their faces radiant and happy, their souls aglow.
Oratory is heard for hours on end as to how gay and lesbian weddings “threaten” marriage, as if straight marriages across the country will magically fall apart if two men or two women get hitched. For his part, right-wing radio personality Michael Reagan went so far as to opine that if gay marriage is allowed, no straight person in America will be allowed to get married without having at least one gay experience first. President Bush also weighed in on the issue, favoring second-class citizenship for gays and lesbians by denying them the right to get married.
The opponents of gay marriage claim that marriage is reserved solely for straight people, one man and one woman. Gays and lesbians are not allowed. If they really want the legal benefits of marriage, they can join in a civil union (if that is allowed in the first place) and hope for the best. The problem with this, of course, is that it treats gays and lesbians as unworthy of the full benefits of marriage. Telling people “no marriage for you, but here’s a civil union instead” contains more than a whiff of the “separate but equal” doctrine used for decades to justify racial segregation. Now it’s used to justify sexual segregation.
Despite what gay-marriage opponents claim, the basis of a successful marriage is not one set of XX chromosomes and one of XY. Just ask Britney Spears or anyone else who gets married in a drunken fog only to get it annulled within hours or days. Nor is it based on the ability to make a baby, as anyone who has ever undergone fertility treatments or adopted a child will testify. A successful marriage, rather, is based on two people who share love, trust, support and a determination to combine their lives.
Finding that special someone with whom you want to share your life is already all too rare. As we are constantly reminded, the divorce rate in America has hovered around fifty percent for the last few years. Is the solution really to bar a specific class of people from getting married in the first place?
No, discrimination is never the answer. Love and happiness, not DNA, is the basis of marriage. Love is in the air in the Bay State, and I for one applaud it. More states should follow Massachusetts’ lead.
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