The Joy of Gay Marriage

I recently read a column by Frank Rick about gay marriage, in the New York Times, that made great reading but also got me thinking.

Here's the first two paragraphs.

Here's the denouement of the epic drama over gay marriage. It's going to happen, it's going to happen within a generation, and it's going to happen even though George W. Bush teed off his re-election campaign this week by calling for a constitutional amendment to outlaw it. As the country has now had weeks to digest, it has already happened in bulk in San Francisco, where images of couples waiting all night in the rain to be wed finally wiped Janet Jackson off our TV screens. The first of those couples, Phyllis Lyon, 79, and Del Martin, 83, were celebrating a partnership of 51 years. Take that, heterosexual marriage! The most famous practitioner of mixed-sex nuptials this year, Britney Spears, partook of a Vegas marriage that clocked in at 55 hours.

Whatever their short-term legal fate, the San Francisco weddings mark a new high-water mark in one of the most fast-paced cultural tsunamis America has seen. As Evan Wolfson, the civil rights lawyer who founded Freedom to Marry, says, "An act as unremarkable as getting a wedding license" has been transformed by the people embracing it, much as the unremarkable act of sitting at a Formica lunch counter was transformed by an act of civil disobedience at a Woolworth's in North Carolina 44 years ago this month. Gavin Newsom, the heterosexual, Irish Catholic mayor of San Francisco, described his proactive strategy for advancing same-sex marriage to Time magazine: "Put a human face on it. Let's not talk about it in theory. Give me a story. Give me lives." And so now there have been thousands of gay wedding stories, many of them with the couples' parents and children in the supporting cast, at the same City Hall where Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio famously got hitched to no good end a half-century ago.

It was the title that started me thinking. What is "The Joy of Gay Marriage"? Could it be any different from the joy of marriage for non-gays? What is the joy of marriage for me personally?

Starting with myself, I think the first time I became aware of the effect of the political on my personal life was the 1986 Supreme Court ruling in Bowers v. Hardwick, which originated as a challenge to sodomy laws in my home state, Georgia. At the time, 1986, I had been out for about four years. I was about to leave home for college within a year, and I was wondering what kind of life I could expect to have as a gay person in a not-so-gay world. It was the height of the Reagan-Bush years, and from my perspective, the outlook was dim. I felt that the court's decision effectively divorced me and people like me from the Constitution. I was happy to see it overturned year's later, when my life had turned out quite different than I imagined.

At 17, marriage and parenthood seemed entirely out of my reach. Now, as I'm writing this, my husband is out cleaning up the back yard, and our son is napping just a few feet away from me. How did I get here? What made this possible? And with all that I have, why do I want marriage too?

Frank Rick, again, brings back memories that have some bearing on these questions.

The AIDS epidemic, in retrospect, made same-sex marriage inevitable. Americans watched as gay men were turned away at their partners' hospital rooms and denied basic rights granted to heterosexual couples coping with a spouse's terminal illness and death. As the gay civil rights movement gained a life-and-death urgency, the public started to come around, and it has been coming around ever since, at an accelerating rate.

I've often told people that I came out of the closet in the 80s, and AIDS came out right behind me. Like a lot of people, I saw a lot, lost a lot, and learned a lot during those years. Barely into my 20s, I became acquained with death on an intimate basis. I saw friends die, some embraced by their families, and others rejected by their families (only to be reclaimed once dead). I saw partners shut out of hospital rooms and decision making. Some even shut out of the homes they'd shared with their loved ones. And all in the middle of grief. It was a strange mix of love, life, hatred and death that forged the person I became politically, and spiritually.

In the context of today, with the deaths of that period as background, it occurs to me that the desire of at least some in the gay community marry is, well, a natural outcome.

Even the self-appointed defenders of marriage will allow that entering into that kind of commitment with another person is in a very basic way an affirmation of life. Yes, those so-called defenders of marriage will emphasize that the "purpose" of marriage is procreation. However, the spark of marriage begins long before conception, usually in the hearts of the parties involved. The "life" to which one is saying "yes," is not just that which occurs with sperm meets ovum. It is one's own, but not just one's own.

How? At the core of love is belief and hope. Belief in one's own worthiness of love, and one's ability to love. And hope in the goodness of another and his/her ability to love. It's that believe and hope that leads to the risk of loving; the risk that requires faith in another, and encourages faith in others.

When people take vows, they usually do so in front of a gathering of family and friends; a community, if you will. And in some ceremonies, those gathered to witness the vows also promise to help the couple maintain their vows. So it's also saying yes to community, and yes to strengthening community, whether the union includes children or not.

When you think about it, it's clear why our soceity rewards commitment in the form of marriage. It's also clear that communities can and do benefit from stable gay and lesbian unions, with or without children, as they form small parts of larger communities that are held together by such commitments. It's clear that as same sex couples benefit the stability of their communities, they should recieve the same benefits as heterosexual couples.

Comments

[Bishop Pat Buckley]

Hello,

I am a "dissident" Catholic bishop living in Northern Ireland. On May 27th 2005 I am publishing a book called A SEXUAL LIFE, A SPIRITUAL LIFE - A Painful Journey To Inner Peace.

It is an honest account of my own sexual journey as a gay man and also a critique of the Christian and / or Catholic negative approach to sex.

My web site is: bishoppatbuckley.co.uk

[Andrew]

Hi Pat

Are there any attempts to block your book by the "powers-that-used-to-be" ??