Would It Be Ruined, Or Would It Be Saved?

A new article in Time magazine, see it here, seeks to use the notion that gay people deserve marriage as an excuse to end marriage. Well, gosh, Time magazine, thanks! Thanks for giving the haters another argument in how gay marriage would destroy traditional marriage.

The writer of the article, one Michael A. Lindenberger, correctly reminds us that no one, that's right no one, is married until the government says you're married. You can get yourself all gussied up in your finery, tuxedos and veils, and limo on down to the local church, and stand before god and pastors and ministers and rabbis and friends and family and say I do all over the place, but you aren't married until the government says you're married.

So, Lindenberger suggests we abandon the traditional church wedding, in favor of civil unions for any couple, straight or gay. Then, if you want to stand before god and pastors and yada yada yada then go on and do that; it'll be an extra treat but it has no legal meaning. It's a personal thing.

Except that now those anti-gay-marriage folks will use this argument as another way to fight us. They'll have billboards and placards and commercials about how marriage was all well and good until the gays wanted it, and then it all changed; the gays took marriage away from all of us and gave us civil unions instead.

I feel differently. I don't think anyone who is pro-gay marriage wants to change marriage; they just want marriage. They want what everyone else has a right to have, the proclamation of marriage, the legality of marriage, the sanctity of marriage, the recognition of marriage.

And as for same-sex marital recognition, the writer and some lawyers whom he interviewed, believe that if you "[t]ake the state out of the marriage business...then both kinds of couples — straight and gay — would be treated the same."

But would we, straight and gay, really be treated the same? Or would we, the gay community and those who support equal rights for all, be treated differently? Would we forever be acknowledged as the ones who ruined marriage for everybody else? Wouldn't we still be thought of as different because, even though we have our civil unions, like all couples, we would still be denied the right to marry in a church if that's what we wanted?

As Lindenberger points out in his piece, however, giving up the word "marriage" might be an impossible task. Some straight folks may balk at the idea that they can't get "married," and believe they have lost something very important to them. But I say to the straight community, and those that oppose gay marriage, think about how we, the gay community, feel.

We don't have a clue as to what's it's like to lose the right to marry, because we've never had it.