I got this email from Carleton College freshman Raven Pillmann two weeks or so ago:
I am a Carleton student as well as a MN United volunteer. I have a potential story about an upcoming Vote No rally at Carleton this month. We have a possible photo opportunity and definitely have several students who feel strongly affected by the proposed amendment who would be willing to talk about it. Please let me know if I can call you anytime with more information!
Raven got up early and met me at my corner office at GBM last Thursday. And he emailed me yesterday to send me a photo of he and his fellow classmates preparing for the rally and that they have a Carls Vote NO! Facebook event page which says in part:
Come to the Great Hall on Wednesday, October 17th from 7:30-8:30 p.m. to hear speakers from the Carleton and Northfield communities, eat delicious Firebellies food, listen to Ova Yonder and The Accidentals, and get inspired to become involved in the Vote NO! movement.
Yay Raven! And keep up the momentum, Griff! Thanks for your writing about this issue!
I wonder how Gays would react and feel if the GLBT people had established a society before the one we all live in now, with certain rules and customs for themselves and then the heterosexual people came along and demanded that they change their customs and laws and do whatever we want you to do no matter if you want us around or not.
Bright…Your comment seems based on the assumption that our society was ‘established’ only by heterosexuals. Not so.
Paul, my comment is based on the fact that marriage is a sacrament and legal license law for a man and a woman.
When it is no longer for a man and a woman, it is no longer marriage.
Humans being humans, I imagine they’d have reacted with fear and outrage, and insisted that there was no reason to change society just to accommodate other people. Whereupon the het community would feel excluded, marginalized, and like they were being treated as less than human.
But I don’t really see why this is a bigger deal than any of the many other ways in which we’ve changed our rules and customs to adapt to new realizations, like “women are not actually structurally inferior to men and might be competent to vote” or “maybe women should be able to legally own property in their own right”. The latter was a change to our marriage laws, after all; it was part of the removal of coverture, which was previously understood to be absolutely essential to the nature of marriage.
I think, though, you’re missing a key component of the social dynamic: Gays and lesbians are a tiny minority of the people who want legal recognition for same-sex relationships. The majority of the people who want that recognition are straight people. This has been true of other things; women got the vote because a majority of men voted for them to get it, and minorities have always gotten rights only when the majority was ready to approve them.
But… Honestly, when someone comes to me and says “this social structure is awesome, I want to participate too”, my answer is usually “yes”, because that is how you make a strong society.
Possibly relevant, the 2nd Circuit court of appeals recently weighed in on the federal DOMA law, which they ruled unconstitutional. They make a core point:
Ultimately, that’s really the point; as long as we’re talking about the law, only arguments related to civil and legal rights are relevant.
This Youtube video had my hackles up…. but watch it to the end. It is pretty powerful!
That really is a thing of beauty. I’ve played a couple of versions of the “is this quote from a speech against gay marriage or a quote against interracial marriage?” game, and I can almost never tell.
Before I look at Robbie’s recommendation video, let me say, I do feel like legal marriage is being threatened and it is scary because it is already on shaky ground what with so many marriages ending in divorce already. There is not enough respect in marriage and I think that is bad for kids. I am a kid of divorce and all the ones I know have a tougher time. You can say it builds character but you don’t need that type of character builder. You can say it’s better to have no marriage than a bad marriage, and I say, it’s better to know who you are marrying before you commit, before you start making babies and before you join financial forces. The gay thing right now gives lots of hets a chance to think how much more irrelevant marriage is for them and it’s just something else to whittle away respect for other humans, adult or children who feel good in a structured, legal relationship.
There is also a fear that any two or three or three hundred human can get married to each other just because they want certain legal rights.
I absolutely agree that the institution of marriage is being threatened. It’s being threatened by people who deny the primacy of commitment, of family bonds, of loyalty, and all these other things, substituting “one man and one woman” as a definition.
When you have people asserting that some celebrity being “married” for 72 hours is more worthy of our society’s respect and deference than two people who were loyal and faithful to each other for fifty years, because the celebrity married someone of the opposite sex, and the two people were of the same sex? Yeah, marriage is being threatened.
As is so often the case, the essence of effective evil is to pretend very hard to be good, and to propose ritual purity as a substitute for morality, focusing on form over substance. The substance of marriage is not sex, it’s commitment. Commitment matters; sex doesn’t.