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I don't believe in marriage. Hard to believe that a minister feels that way, but there you go. I don't believe in marriage for a lot of reasons, but any urge I might have had to get married for other than purely legal reasons (which can be filed under "selfish" rather than "sentimental") has been killed both by the debate over gay marriage and the presentation of same in the press.
Marriage is an institution that changes, has always changed, and will always change. A lot of people seem to think that the current "now" is a snapshot of the way life is, should be, and ever will be, amen. This is patently untrue. ALL social institutions undergo change as the society does; nothing is a preserved tradition, nor is anything universal.*
Marriage is merely a legal commitment to another person for the purpose of raising, legally safely, children. That's it.
As such, marriage is becoming increasingly outmoded. The marriage debate is the hundred-and-forty-second-before-last gasp of an institution that is, once again, in the throes of change. And it's not just gay marriage that is bringing that change on. Marriage, as the committed, religious union of two people, one male, one female, is under attack from atheism, divorce, gays, and straights who opt out of marriage, choosing whatever other way of living you care to name. There may also be small boys throwing rocks opposing it as well, but we'll never know, in my scientific study.
So, for myself, I don't need to prove that I love someone through a piece of paper - and should I stop loving them, that piece of paper is going to get in my way and my partner's way. I see no reason for it.
The legal commitment that an amazing number of people seem to find sacred and sacrosanct is changing as we speak. Fewer people are getting married, and there's a pretty vocal group of people seeking the right to marry that threatens people who already have that right, at least according to some of those.
This leads directly to the presentation of gay marriage in the media.
The debate over gay marriage is not about achieving true equality under the law, nor is it about preserving marital traditions that have lasted about 200 years at best. It is, in fact, at least on the part of some straight people (and I've nothing against straight people, I have at least one good friend who is irredeemably straight; I call him "Token-boy") an attempt to make gays fit into their view of society by emulating straight patterns of marriage.
And the idea of gay marriage is terrifying to a lot of people who realise on some level that they are no longer right. If the numbers of new marriages are any indication, these people - and all of us like to be right - who have made a choice to marry may find out that they were kind of wrong. Whether it should be important what other people think of your life is irrelevant here.
You love someone, you commit to them. You commit to them, you legalise that status both with the state and with god.
Because we've all heard the stories. We've all heard how gays (and I use the term interchangeably for gays and lesbians, so sorry if I stepped on your tiny paradigm) cruise. They shack up. They don't commit. They spread disease, which is all right except when the disease gets brought to the straight community (although this transmission vector is usually bisexuals, who cruise like gays but don't have an id tag so you never know who you're in bed with). They
break the law. They are worse, in all respects, than plague rats, except gays usually don't start with the slums as the origin of their attack on society.
But you know, if gays marry, thereby emulating straights, they're sort of...well, normal. They're like us.
This is the press angle on the situation.
In the pursuit of the unachievable, the image-makers are using the non-representative to make the step of gay marriage palatable for a group of people that, rather like lemmings, has realised that Catastrophic Change is coming their way. They're like Beanie Baby collectors who sense, somehow, that the market is about to drop and they need to offload their overpriced crap now. That's what the defenders of marriage seem like to me, in quite a lot of cases. So the other side goes to work to present that gays are not the scary bugaboos of change, they're not coming to steal your Beanie Babies, and they will, in fact, be quite well-behaved when they get there.
But neither side - Marriage=Love or Marriage=Straight - represents the truth. The first side is too committed to making it look like if we let gays into our consciousness (in the same way that we have failed to allow women and minorities in) they'll be nice and not widdle on the rug. The second group is too committed to saying "No, we're right and you're different, so you can't be right because that threatens me."
My mother pointed out recently that she thought that the marriage debate was for the benefit of people my age; I had to gently point out to her that among people my age (and that's not just a survey of my friends, that's a bunch of surveys) marriage is declining in popularity at an astonishing rate. Obviously, that's helped by companies with liberal policies about domestic partner insurance etc, but it's also a choice made by people who don't have that safety net. Marriage is an institution that, like your father's Oldsmobile, isn't selling as well as it used to, regardless of the sexual orientation of the people concerned.
So to my way of thinking, we should just get rid of the whole bloody institution and base commitment to our chosen partner(s) on something other than a piece of paper. It's absolute stupidity to try to use love as a means to an agenda, whatever the agenda, and I don't know which is worse, the people who want gays to be straight-emulators or the people who want marriage to be only the refuge of straights - and all of them at that.
Perhaps it's my pointless protest, but I couldn't get involved in marriage for sentimental reasons because so many people who are already in that group piss me off.
*As a total digression, the only taboo that comes CLOSE to being universal is incest - but that depends on how you define incest. A fair number of societies are fine with relationships Western civilisation would consider incestuous but don't allow ones we would have no difficulty with.
Marriage is an institution that changes, has always changed, and will always change. A lot of people seem to think that the current "now" is a snapshot of the way life is, should be, and ever will be, amen. This is patently untrue. ALL social institutions undergo change as the society does; nothing is a preserved tradition, nor is anything universal.*
Marriage is merely a legal commitment to another person for the purpose of raising, legally safely, children. That's it.
As such, marriage is becoming increasingly outmoded. The marriage debate is the hundred-and-forty-second-before-last gasp of an institution that is, once again, in the throes of change. And it's not just gay marriage that is bringing that change on. Marriage, as the committed, religious union of two people, one male, one female, is under attack from atheism, divorce, gays, and straights who opt out of marriage, choosing whatever other way of living you care to name. There may also be small boys throwing rocks opposing it as well, but we'll never know, in my scientific study.
So, for myself, I don't need to prove that I love someone through a piece of paper - and should I stop loving them, that piece of paper is going to get in my way and my partner's way. I see no reason for it.
The legal commitment that an amazing number of people seem to find sacred and sacrosanct is changing as we speak. Fewer people are getting married, and there's a pretty vocal group of people seeking the right to marry that threatens people who already have that right, at least according to some of those.
This leads directly to the presentation of gay marriage in the media.
The debate over gay marriage is not about achieving true equality under the law, nor is it about preserving marital traditions that have lasted about 200 years at best. It is, in fact, at least on the part of some straight people (and I've nothing against straight people, I have at least one good friend who is irredeemably straight; I call him "Token-boy") an attempt to make gays fit into their view of society by emulating straight patterns of marriage.
And the idea of gay marriage is terrifying to a lot of people who realise on some level that they are no longer right. If the numbers of new marriages are any indication, these people - and all of us like to be right - who have made a choice to marry may find out that they were kind of wrong. Whether it should be important what other people think of your life is irrelevant here.
You love someone, you commit to them. You commit to them, you legalise that status both with the state and with god.
Because we've all heard the stories. We've all heard how gays (and I use the term interchangeably for gays and lesbians, so sorry if I stepped on your tiny paradigm) cruise. They shack up. They don't commit. They spread disease, which is all right except when the disease gets brought to the straight community (although this transmission vector is usually bisexuals, who cruise like gays but don't have an id tag so you never know who you're in bed with). They
break the law. They are worse, in all respects, than plague rats, except gays usually don't start with the slums as the origin of their attack on society.
But you know, if gays marry, thereby emulating straights, they're sort of...well, normal. They're like us.
This is the press angle on the situation.
In the pursuit of the unachievable, the image-makers are using the non-representative to make the step of gay marriage palatable for a group of people that, rather like lemmings, has realised that Catastrophic Change is coming their way. They're like Beanie Baby collectors who sense, somehow, that the market is about to drop and they need to offload their overpriced crap now. That's what the defenders of marriage seem like to me, in quite a lot of cases. So the other side goes to work to present that gays are not the scary bugaboos of change, they're not coming to steal your Beanie Babies, and they will, in fact, be quite well-behaved when they get there.
But neither side - Marriage=Love or Marriage=Straight - represents the truth. The first side is too committed to making it look like if we let gays into our consciousness (in the same way that we have failed to allow women and minorities in) they'll be nice and not widdle on the rug. The second group is too committed to saying "No, we're right and you're different, so you can't be right because that threatens me."
My mother pointed out recently that she thought that the marriage debate was for the benefit of people my age; I had to gently point out to her that among people my age (and that's not just a survey of my friends, that's a bunch of surveys) marriage is declining in popularity at an astonishing rate. Obviously, that's helped by companies with liberal policies about domestic partner insurance etc, but it's also a choice made by people who don't have that safety net. Marriage is an institution that, like your father's Oldsmobile, isn't selling as well as it used to, regardless of the sexual orientation of the people concerned.
So to my way of thinking, we should just get rid of the whole bloody institution and base commitment to our chosen partner(s) on something other than a piece of paper. It's absolute stupidity to try to use love as a means to an agenda, whatever the agenda, and I don't know which is worse, the people who want gays to be straight-emulators or the people who want marriage to be only the refuge of straights - and all of them at that.
Perhaps it's my pointless protest, but I couldn't get involved in marriage for sentimental reasons because so many people who are already in that group piss me off.
*As a total digression, the only taboo that comes CLOSE to being universal is incest - but that depends on how you define incest. A fair number of societies are fine with relationships Western civilisation would consider incestuous but don't allow ones we would have no difficulty with.
