Married to Hatred

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Democrats look to back gay marriage at convention (Reuters)

In the wake of the whole controversy over Chick-Fil-A President Dan Cathy coming out forcefully against same-sex marriage, I got treated to one of my Facebook friends trying to argue the issue with a Chick-Fil-A supporter who repeatedly asserted that homosexuality is morally equivalent to murder. It reminded me of my recent observations on the difficulties in trying to have real conversations with people on issues like reforming drug laws and legalizing prostitution, as did the aftermath of the Aurora theatre shooting and how so many in the media said words to the effect of, “We know we need to have a discussion on the impact that permissive gun laws are having in America, but the NRA is really powerful so we’re not even going to try to start the conversation.” It’s bad enough that there are so many important topics that are assumed, rightly or wrongly, to be impossible to discuss, but more and more in these past four years it seems like an increasing part of the right-wing of this country doesn’t want to discuss any topic with anyone.

The problem the right-wing has is that we have talked about same-sex marriage, and the arguments that supporters have made — such as pointing out same-sex partners not being allowed to visit one another in the hospital — managed to strike an emotional chord with a large number of people. For a time the idea of granting same-sex couples some of the rights of legally married couples under the “civil unions” moniker was all that the left-wing of this country could hope for, but increasingly this country is turning towards the idea of full marriage equality. It’s hardly sweeping across the whole nation, as this year’s referendum in North Carolina so clearly showed, but most national polls are showing close to a 50/50 split on the issue, a huge shift in just the past twenty years.

I haven’t written too much about same-sex marriage on the .org. In part this is because other areas of GLBT equality are of more interest to me, but my own feelings about the whole concept of marriage have been hard to pin down over the years. For the most part, I’ve spent my adult years firmly convinced that I wanted no part of any marriage; only one person made me question that belief, more than ten years ago, and that person has since passed away. The idea that two people would make such a commitment to each other, ostensibly for life, has never felt completely natural to me, even when I was surrounded by so many strong and lasting marriages in my blood family. I’m still young, though, and someone may yet come along to change my personal beliefs about marriage.

Turning back to the broader social issues at work in the current marriage debate, so much seems to be turning on this one word, “marriage,” and how it’s being used. The whole concept of marriage started as a religious concept, but it was only much, much later in humankind’s development that we felt a need to keep track of human couplings in legal terms. Due to the way we humans conducted our affairs several centuries ago, when we began keeping legal track of human couplings, using the word “marriage” wasn’t a controversial choice at all. This was back when same-sex conduct could get you killed by the state, a condition which the Family Research Council, one of the groups Chick-Fil-A donates to, wants to be the rule of the law in Uganda at least. (The whole Chick-Fil-A thing goes far beyond same-sex marriage, as so many others are pointing out right now.) Now popular opinion on what constitutes a “legal coupling,” for lack of a better phrase, is shifting, and we’re left with the baggage of the most conventional term for that coupling — the dreaded m-word — being associated with religious doctrine.

When you take the m-word out of the equation, it seems like people are slightly more willing to support the idea that same-sex couples deserve the same rights as opposite-sex couples. It’s the whole use of that religious word to define a legal concept, something seemingly at odds with the First Amendment, that rankles a lot of people. What we’re supposed to do about this problem in 2012 isn’t easy to figure out. Granting the same rights to all couples but using the “civil union” term for same-sex couplings feels like “separate but equal” all over again. For a time I thought the solution was to rename the legal concept “civil union” for all couples, allowing previous couplings to retain the “marriage” name, but now that feels problematic to me as well.

Recently I was reminded of someone I used to associate with who, whenever anyone started a sentence with the word “hopefully,” would drone on and on about how the word meant “done with hope,” and shouldn’t be used as a substitute for “I hope.” It was kind of obvious that he, and other people I’ve run into online, memorize this one particular part of Strunk and White and blurt it out whenever they can to make themselves sound smarter; you almost expect them to then complain that a “student body” should be called a “studentry” instead. What the whole “hopefully” argument fails to take into account is that languages change over time; if I’d told you to “google” something fifteen years ago you would’ve thought I was insane, for just one example. I had a professor at the University of Toledo who frequently brought up how “insofar” had to spelled as three words when she was going to college. Similarly, some adverbs, like “hopefully,” have taken on new meanings over time as “sentence adverbs” that can modify a whole sentence instead of a single verb. If someone uses an adverb like “hopefully” in this manner, everyone knows what that person is trying to say, and complaining about the “original meaning” of the word pretty much falls into the same camp as proclaiming in this age that sentences should never end with a preposition.

This seems to be the best path to take what the problem of what to name same-sex couplings: Let the language evolve. If we accept the premise that both same-sex and opposite-sex couplings need to use the same name, and “marriage” has had hundreds of years of usage as the word to describe a coupling, then it should probably remain that way. People will need to be mindful of the differences between a legal marriage and a religious marriage — I wonder how many opponents of same-sex marriage mistakenly believe that legalizing same-sex marriage would force churches to perform same-sex marriage ceremonies regardless of their own views on marriage — but I doubt this will take even twenty years for people to wrap their minds around.

The problem is that the debate over the name isn’t really what’s at issue at this moment with the whole Chick-Fil-A thing; what’s going on is Republicans and conservatives once again using the broader issue of GLBT rights as a wedge to try to scare their base into turning out at the polls in greater numbers this November. What happened earlier this year in North Carolina played out here in Ohio in 2004, with Republican legislators bringing a statewide referendum on a constitutional amendment to define marriage as only opposite-sex marriage, even when our Constitution already included that definition, to the ballot in November to make sure homophobic Ohioans would come to the polls and help Bush 43 defeat John Kerry; the tactic may very well have decided the state, which ultimately decided that year’s election, for Bush. Back then Massachusetts had recently become the first state to legalize same-sex marriage, and Lawrence v. Texas had just struck down the country’s remaining sodomy laws, so there was a huge “gay panic” in the right-wing of this country that they were able to ride to electoral victory that year.

This year? Well, I’d like to think that Democrats are being courageous by taking this stand, but like all things having to do with the Democratic Party I’m guessing that this is merely an issue of convenience. It’s not like the right wing of this country can get more fired up for this election than they already are, and with Democrats needing to close the enthusiasm gap before November, this is probably just a calculation on their part to shore up support among the GLBT community and its supporters. President Obama did end Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, but did it long after he promised to do so, and don’t even get me started on the rest of his broken promises from his 2008 campaign. Assuming Obama gets reelected in November, I will wait and see if Democrats in Washington really do bring marriage equality to the whole country, but I’m not getting my hopes up about it.

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