About a month ago, Dan Savage wrote a column for The Stranger explaining just how he, a gay man, was able to get a legal marriage license in the city of Seattle. It was pretty simple, actually.
He applied for, and was granted, a license to marry his lesbian friend.
The clerk called over her manager, a nice older white man, who explained that Amy and Sonia couldn’t have a marriage license. So I asked if Amy and I could have one–even though I’m gay and live with my boyfriend, and Amy’s a lesbian and lives with her girlfriend. We emphasized to the clerk and her manager that Amy and I don’t live together, we don’t love each other, we don’t plan to have kids together, and we’re going to go on living and sleeping with our same-sex partners after we get married. So could we still get a marriage license?
“Sure,” the license-department manager said, “If you’ve got \$54, you can have a marriage license.”
…Amy can’t marry Sonia, I can’t marry Terry–why? Because the sanctity of marriage must be protected from the queers! But Amy and I can get a marriage license–and into a sham marriage, if we care to, a joke marriage, one that I promise you won’t produce children. And we can do this with the state’s blessing–why? Because one of us is a man and one of us is a woman. Who cares that one of us is a gay man and one of us is a lesbian? So marriage is to be protected from the homos–unless the homos marry each other.
Is it putting too fine a point on it to say that this is a pretty fucked-up situation?
Dan and Amy got their license, and last week, they got married.
Savage and Jennigs got a marriage license, got married by a minister of the Universal Life Church and plan to file their license with King County, making the marriage legal.
Afterwards the [couple] plan an immediate divorce.
“We are going to try and stay married for about 55 hours and 10 minutes. We are going to just best Britney Spears,” he laughed.
So, congratulations Dan and Amy!
The situation provoked a very interesting discussion on Metafilter which I’ve just spent much of the evening reading through. Lots of well-reasoned, well thought out, intelligent, and passionate arguments in favor of allowing anyone to marry the people they love regardless of which way their genitalia point, and only a couple of people trying to make reasonable arguments against gay marriage (and not doing a very good job, in my opinion). I believe this was one of my favorite posts:
There’s a large set of psychological reactions we have to an associate’s mate. Take the earlier example of a male corporate executive’s partner of twenty five years dying, and the guy having to suffer in silence. It’s not about the time off. It really is about condolences, the understanding, the empathy. You can’t use semantics to erase this; this is a fight for empathy. Gay people are insisting that other humans respect their capacity for deep, abiding love — and those other humans are protesting, because “they’d never marry such a person”.
We cannot have an honest debate without admitting openly that it’s not just about legal rights and that it’s not merely about what a church feels. You can’t legislate condolences — but you can remove the legal rubric that says it’s OK to ignore the love of another.
[…]
If you really want to talk religion, The Creator of the Universe saw fit to breathe the binding fire of love into all mankind — He did not restrict it as a special gift to straights, any more than he did for whites (which would make whites more special) or English speakers (which would make English speakers more special) or the rich. You are familiar with the phrase that God is Love. You need to take a good long hard look at the fact that every time you reject gay marriage, you are denying a love so powerful it is willing to be martyred. That’s far more God-rejecting than anything two people in Love could ever do.
But I don’t really want to talk religion here. Look. I know my viewpoint doesn’t fall into the nice, neat categories of “keep your religion out of my life” vs. “that’s unholy”. But we really need to be honest here — this is a fight for the tiny respects, not just the grandiose ones. It’s a fight for humanization, and it’s one that naturally fought by every single second class citizen throughout history.
iTunes: “Hello I Am Your Heart” by Hickman, Sara from the album Rubáiyát: Elektra’s 40th Anniversary (1990, 2:44).