Redefining Marriage

1. In my experience, the answer is always something like, “That’s a crazy analogy! You can’t change your race, but you choose to be gay!” This fails on a couple of major issues:

   1) [Most obvious] Their claim about homosexuality being a choice is nothing more than an unsupported assertion that doesn’t sit well with a modern understanding of human sexuality.
   2) Their understanding of the analogy is completely sideways. Assuming you’ve chosen a person to marry, you can’t change that person’s race or gender. You can change your choice of partners if forced to, but that’s true in either case. You could just as well take their “homosexuality is a choice” premise as gospel and the analogy would still hold. “Well, you can choose not to marry somebody of another race. Society shouldn’t have to support your kooky desire to marry outside your race.”

   My progressive state of California would have made my marriage license if I had filed for it less than 60 years earlier. You can bet that I’ll be taking that to the polls with me when I have to face whatever draconian constitutional amendment the religious right puts forward to overturn our recent Supreme Court ruling.

   As an interesting side note, the California constitution looks a lot like the federal tax code with all the crap we’ve stuffed into it. That alone should be a strong argument for making the damned thing harder to amend.

2. “That’s a crazy analogy! You can’t change your race, but you choose to be gay!”

   Yes, just like Ted Haggard chose to be gay. Just like countless thousands of people think to themselves, “Gee, what if I decided to be gay? That way, I could cause fights with my family, lose a lot of my friends, be reviled by society, and probably get kicked out of my church. Yeah, that sounds like fun!”

   My progressive state of California would have made my marriage license if I had filed for it less than 60 years earlier.

   Is there a word missing after “license”, like maybe “illegal”? Does that mean California legalized interracial marriage around 1900, and that your sweetie has a different albedo from yours?

   California constitution looks a lot like the federal tax code with all the crap we’ve stuffed into it.

   Yeah, I kinda got that impression. Every time I go there around election time, there are always posters saying to vote {Yes,No} on Proposition N. What does it take to get a proposition like that introduced? 100 signatures and $35 or something?

   Maybe you should scrape together $35 and 100 signatures, and introduce a resolution making it harder to introduce resolutions. Then you could put up billboards saying “Vote No on resolutions!”

   At any rate, I’m cautiously optimistic about this election: from what I’ve heard, the percentage of people opposed to gay marriage in California has been steadily declining since 2004. Maybe the fact that Massachusetts hasn’t yet been swallowed by an earthquake has assuaged some fears.

3. Yes, just like Ted Haggard chose to be gay. Just like countless thousands of people think to themselves, “Gee, what if I decided to be gay? That way, I could cause fights with my family, lose a lot of my friends, be reviled by society, and probably get kicked out of my church. Yeah, that sounds like fun!”

   I get the impression that these folks think that homosexuality is so tempting that there will be no more straight people left if they don’t stomp it out using every legal means they have.

   Is there a word missing after “license”, like maybe “illegal”?

   Yes. That sentence got a bit chopped up. I think that the actual wording of the law is “illegal and void.”

   Does that mean California legalized interracial marriage around 1900, and that your sweetie has a different albedo from yours?

   To rephrase: I was married less than 60 years after California started issuing interracial marriage licenses. The ruling was Perez v Sharp in 1948. Note that it was a court decision and not a legislative act or popular vote. Surprise, surprise.

   Anyway, yes, my wife is on the long list of people I wouldn’t have been allowed to marry in fairly recent history. That fact, combined with the fact that our marriage doesn’t even raise an eyebrow these days, is a strong indication of how little these types of restrictions are missed once they’re gone. I’ve never heard anybody say, “Hey, remember when whites weren’t allowed to marry Negroes, Mongols, or members of the Malay race? Marriage really went to hell when they repealed that law.”

   I’m mentally adding the debates over gay marriage to reasons why they will hate us in the future.

   Yeah, I kinda got that impression. Every time I go there around election time, there are always posters saying to vote {Yes,No} on Proposition N. What does it take to get a proposition like that introduced? 100 signatures and $35 or something?

   I think the issue is that it’s easy to hire a bunch of people to gather signatures outside of Target and Wal Mart. The people out pushing for signatures usually aren’t volunteers. In fact, they’re usually working for a bunch of campaigns, hoping to find a person who will just blindly sign a dozen petitions without bothering to decide whether the support them or not. I have to wonder how many people end up voting against propositions that their signatures helped to get on the ballot. It seems to me that a quick fix might be making it illegal to pay people to gather signatures. It’s either important enough to get volunteers or it’s not important enough to get on the ballot.

   Fortunately, we have our priorities in order. It will only take a 51% vote to enshrine our fleeting social insecurities into the constitution, but it takes 67% of the vote to raise a half-cent sales tax.

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