Marriage, Family and The Opposition

This past week, on May 17th, the first legal marriages between gays and lesbians in the United States took place in the state of Massachusetts. Those who oppose it are shamefully wrong, just as they and their kind were wrong about legalizing interracial marriages, desegregating schools, suffrage for women, abolition of slavery and countless other times when the majority sought to exclude those they deemed inferior, usually using God and The Bible as justification. See No One Speaks for God here on Queer Visions.

Excerpts from a NYTimes editorial by Andrew Sullivan entitled Integration Day follow:

"...Marriage, after all, is perhaps the chief mechanism for integrating new families into old ones. The ceremony is a unifying ritual, one in which peers and grandparents meet, best friends and distant relatives chatter. It's hard for heterosexuals to imagine being denied this moment. It is, after all, regarded in our civil religion as the "happiest day of your life." And that is why the denial of such a moment to gay family members is so jarring and cruel. It rends people from their own families; it builds an invisible but unscalable wall between them and the people they love and need...

...I remember the moment I figured out I was gay. Right then, I realized starkly what it meant: there would never be a time when my own family would get together to celebrate a new, future family. I would never have a relationship as valid as my parents' or my brother's or my sister's. It's hard to describe what this realization does to a young psyche, but it is profound. At that moment, the emotional segregation starts, and all that goes with it: the low self-esteem, the notion of sex as always alien to a stable relationship, the pain of having to choose between the family you were born into and the love you feel...

...These are not "gay marriages." They are marriages. What these couples are affirming is not something new; it is as old as humanity itself. What has ended — in one state, at least — is separatism. We have taken a step toward making homosexuality a non-issue; toward making gay citizens merely and supremely citizens.

...This is why I am so surprised by the resistance of many conservatives to this reform. It is the most pro-family measure imaginable — keeping families together, building new ones, strengthening the ties between generations...

...I cannot think of another minority whom conservatives would seek to exclude from family life and personal responsibility. But here is a minority actually begging for a chance to contribute on equal terms, to live up to exactly the same responsibilities as everyone else ... Conservatives, with the president chief among them, have said to these people that they are beneath the dignity of equality and the promises of American life. They alone are beneath the fold of family."