Gay Marriage and the Real Danger

Several weeks ago, I logged into my LiveJournal blog account to find the following, rather heartening little memo being passed around:

"Copy this sentence into your LiveJournal if you're in a heterosexual marriage, and you don't want it 'protected' by the bigots who think that gay marriage hurts it somehow. "

I was pleased to see it. Having quite recently entered into the bonds of matrimony, I've been thinking a lot more than usual about marriage and what it means, both to me and my spouse and to society in general.

Just a few days after I re-posted that little sentence in my journal, Proposition 8 was passed in California, defining in no uncertain terms what marriage is supposed to mean to me: a joining between a man and a woman. Period. Thinking of the beloved gay and lesbian friends in my life, it made the brand-new certificate of legal marriage on my dresser seem almost a profanity, a thing born of inequality and reeking with the stench of privilege.

The refusal of our nation's government (and people, in the case of Prop 8) to provide these rights to all adults who want them sends a pretty strong message about what our society considers a marriage to be, and it's not a definition that sits well with this author.

While technically, my own marriage is, indeed, a bond between a man and a woman, I'm nonetheless offended to think that gender is what defines it. I was raised to believe that marriage is a partnership, a covenant of love and (usually) eroticism, a commitment to a lifetime of faithfulness and hard work and above all, the building of a mutually supportive and beneficial life together. And frankly, I just can't see what the particular genitals, sex, or gender identity of myself or my partner has to do with any of that. These things certainly play a role in my preferences and my relationship, but they're little more than base biological realities.

And of course, I feel that those biological realities create certain requirements for a marriage, but not in the way the anti-gay agenda feels they do. Because of my sexual orientation, I am my happiest, my most fulfilled, in a romantic relationship with a man. I would suffer a great and unnecessary loss to my happiness if I were compelled to avoid a partner of my preferred gender, so why would I ask that anyone else be forced to make the same sacrifice? The "man, woman" definition of marriage does more than exclude same-sex relationships, it encourages the creation of heterosexual marriages where satisfying erotic intimacy is not possible. Do gay marriage opponents fail to realize this, or do they simply fail to care? Do they continue to cling to the "homosexuality is a choice" fallacy in spite of all science and common sense? Or has sexual fulfillment simply become such a taboo form of happiness that we feel it necessary to actively campaign against its preservation?

If marriage is not for love in our society, what, then, is it for? If marriage does not serve romantic commitment in equality, what on earth is its purpose?

Please, spare me any answers that cite the necessity for childbirth, or the apparent, earth-shattering importance of preserving semantics and definitions. Neither of these arguments hold water in a world where language is constantly evolving and no one bats an eye at straight couples who cannot, or do not, procreate. Hysterical panic-mongering revolving around the need to "think of the children!" (cue voiceover from The Simpsons's Mrs. Lovejoy) is equally nonsensical and unfounded for anyone with the observational skills of a turnip.

No, the anti-gay agenda has no real interest in these hollow justifications. They are a cover for the real agenda, the real fear held by these groups: marriage equality. Not just equality of who can marry, but equality within marriage.

I'm not the first person to posit this hypothesis by any means, and so naturally, the anti-gay right has had ample opportunities to vehemently deny that the accusation has any merit whatsoever. But what is "traditional" man-woman marriage, then?

In answer to this question, the right is all too eager to start a conversation about the complementarity of the sexes and the "natural" dichotomy of gendered behaviors and roles (so very natural, it seems, that people like them must devote their lives to keeping people from deviating from them). They may deny their desire for "inequality" in so many words, but they'll nonetheless rhapsodize over their own described conceptions of an imaginary, 1950s-era world (one which bears a stronger resemblance to television and advertising from the time than it does to any real history).

My marriage, it seems, is really defined by the very types of gender roles my husband and I balked at in adolescence. Apparently, our union is not about love and partnership at all! Instead, it's defined by such wonderful qualities as: my submission to his authority (no inequality there; it's all for my own good), his ability to prove his earning power (coupled with my responsibility to constantly test it through frivolous spending and the desire for jewelry), my enthusiastic bearing of children, the distribution of household tasks and personal hobbies along gender lines rather than abilities and interest, the preservation of my sexual purity (largely centered in the prevention of any sinful enjoyment on my part), and of course, the mutual enforcement in one another of standards of "femininity" and "masculinity."

Forgive me, "traditional marriage," but if that's what you're selling, I don't care to buy it.

I'm afraid my definition of marriage is quite different from yours. You see an institution put in place for what you call the "stability" of society, but all I see is love, and love is nothing if it is not subversive. Love alone, in all its forms, has the power to destroy the oppressive social institutions we still cling to without really knowing why. And yes, sometimes, that includes the power, and the requirement, to destroy tradition.