Employee Recommended Arguement

Beren deMotier * writer * artist * human

Employee Recommended Argument

I just came from Barnes and Noble where I was taking a child-free moment to cruise the aisles, lingering deliciously over the novels, stopping at attention grabbing titles that had little to do with the contents inside, and finding myself in the Gay & Lesbian section checking out the new volumes on same-sex marriage. There were four thick volumes hot off the presses. And beneath one of them, Jonathan Rauch’s Gay Marriage, Why it is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America was an “employee recommended” card, giving a twenty percent discount off that title. When I looked closer I saw that on the card was written, “Queers should be able to screw up this institution too” signed Nick.

I wasn’t sure whether to complain about the irreverent language (was Nick the employee queer identified? queer friendly? or was queer being used in a derogatory sense?), be glad that consumers were being given an economic incentive to read a positive take on same-sex marriage, be annoyed as a writer that Nick didn’t bother to actually say anything about the book in question that would inform a potential reader of its merits or scream with rage that something we gay and lesbian Americans have been denied (surely the largest potential class-action suit ever) was dismissed so cavalierly.

Rehashing it later with my straight neighbor, she blew my socks off by saying Nick was absolutely right, “you should be able to screw up that institution too.” She thought it was a rational argument in an irrational situation (since she also thinks it is absurd that we don’t have the right to marry and is insulted for us at the notion of civil unions). Certainly it is one argument in our favor; that we should have the same right to mess up, trivialize or take lightly the institution of marriage, the same as any other couple who jumps into matrimony with both eyes shut.

However much I like to think of marriage as a serious commitment, an expression of love and a contract to keep going even when the going gets tough, it is also a choice enjoyed by most Americans that has not been ours to make. And since freedom of choice is what made America America, instead of another British colony, and is what makes our nation a consumer culture where freedom of expression, even during the reign of John Ashcroft, is still an honored ideal, it makes sense that to argue equal access to a choice might be a winning argument.

It may even be what brings us the right to marriage in the long run.

Because we’re never going to convince everyone that we’re law-abiding, church going, honorable people and about as benign as Bambi’s mother. Nor should we have to. There will never be a one hundred percent consensus that we have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness if that includes marriage. And there will always be a goodly percentage of folks who believe we’re going to hell in a hand basket and basically good riddance.

But fortunately our laws exist not only to serve the majority, they serve the minority too.

Missouri may have just cemented discrimination into their state Constitution by a whopping seventy percent majority, but other battles are underway and Washington state may soon become the second state to allow legal same-sex marriage if the state Supreme Court favorably reviews the recent King County ruling that banning same-sex marriage (under DOMA) violated that state’s Constitution. The Oregon elections are going to be watched closely, since we are another state where the failure of a Constitutional ban on same-sex marriage may mean the eventuality of more gay and lesbian marriages here, and considering the groundwork done, soon.

Whatever the elections decide, more court cases will arise. More same-sex couples, emboldened by the success of the few, will sue for equal access to marriage, and more and more, judges will have to ask themselves; is there a compelling reason to discriminate based on sexual orientation? Are the couples ineligible for equal rights? Are they in some way innately inferior and therefore not able to arm themselves with the protection of marriage for their long-term relationships, with all the hundreds of legal advantages that offers? Are they citizens under the law, or somehow exempt from its protections?

Social conservatives might call people like King County Superior Judge William L. Downing, who ruled in the King County case, or Agnes Sowle, the County attorney who wrote the recommendation that spurred same-sex marriage in Multnomah County “activists”, but they were merely doing their job to interpret the law without prejudice, a pretty challenging job.

More and more the law is recognizing, as Nick the Barnes and Noble employee did, that we should have equal access to screwing up, or doing exceptionally well at, the institution of marriage.