Beren deMotier * writer * artist * human
copyright March 17, 2004 Beren deMotier
The Political is also Personal
You can’t go anywhere in Portland these days without the subject of gay marriage coming up. For the last three weeks, our county has been issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples, and another county in Oregon has announced it will do the same starting this week. It is in the news. It is on the brain. But sometimes I feel like screaming, “This is not an intellectual exercise people!”
Luckily, most of the folks I’m hearing from are on the right side. My side. The pro-marriage side. So I shouldn’t get all worked up over this tendency to analyze the subject to death. But sometimes I do. I think it is because I want everyone who is on our side to be as personally affronted by the historical denial of marriage as I am. While my mother, and the neighbor, and the mom in the hall at school feel like Multnomah County is doing the right thing, they still want to talk about process, about public debate, about whether the decision is premature. I must smile, I must nod, but I want to scream irrationally that this is not Sociology 200 or Poli-Sci 101. This is my life, and the lives of millions of gay and lesbian Americans who are having their relationships put on the barbecue of public debate. We just happen to live in this cozy liberal enclave with an incredibly brave and forward thinking County Commission, who recognized that our state Constitution demands equal access to marriage for all Oregonians over the age of seventeen. I like to think they also recognized that marriage relates to the most constructive of human emotions- love, and that most basic of human urges, the desire to mate for life in order to create a stable home, whether that includes children or not. And since, allegedly, all people are created equal in this nation, that means us too.
Those who object to gay marriage as a civil rights issue charge that we have exactly the same rights to marry as anyone else - in other words, we may marry the opposite sex, just like anyone else. We just can’t marry the person we love. We have equal access to a sexually vacant or repugnant marriage, we have equal access to a partnership based not on affection and passion, but on legal benefits and a lack of inheritance tax. We can even go to Vegas and do it up right like Britney Spears if we so choose. What these people need to think in terms of are anti-miscegenation laws. Blacks could marry, whites could marry, they just couldn’t marry each other. Let those who would analyze, publicly debate for decades and put on hold for “the good of society” the issue of gay marriage imagine themselves in love with someone they were denied the right to marry. Let them live knowing their union is considered less than worthy of recognition. Let them flout society, if they dare, and love lawlessly for decades, only to be denied access when their loved one is dying, or considered non-existent in the eyes of social security, when that same loved one passes on.
Personally, we waited long enough, though our seventeen years is a drop in the bucket compared to some. We would need incredibly low self-esteem to not leap at the opportunity to recognize our commitment for what it is; a real marriage. We would have to consider ourselves less than worthy to not look one another in the eyes and say “I do, for better or worse, in sickness and in health, till death do us part.” We would, in fact, have to swallow the idea being promoted by our President and other opponents of gay marriage, that we are not people capable of love and commitment, and that our relationship is not a real marriage or a healthy expression of compassion, love and family. And while that bitter pill has taken down generation after generation of gay people before us, we won’t fall for that, and neither will the millions of gay men and lesbians who will look anyone in the eye, and say, “I am your equal. My love is equal to your love. My family is equal to your family. I will not accept second class citizenship any more.”
After seventeen years, when the window of opportunity opened in our community, we took it. We may have stepped into a legal quagmire, as some gay men and lesbians fear. We may find that our marriage license is so full of legal loopholes that it could serve as a sieve. We may wake up tomorrow with the Governor declaring all the over two thousand marriages performed in the last three weeks (same-sex marriages only of course) null and void and illegal under state law, no matter what the State Constitution would have legal experts believe. But we’re glad we did it. Not only because getting married is meaningful. But also because we, and the thousands of gay and lesbian couples who have jumped at the chance, are a reminder that gay marriage is personal, practical and far from theoretical. We are the faces of gay marriage. Faces just like any other. Faces who were so glad not to have to wait another day to be equal in the eyes of the law.