The Nature of Turning Your Back on Discrimination
“MARRIAGE IS SO GAY” A response.
Forgive me if I lack a sense of humor when it comes to marriage and being gay.
Many of our close friends and acquaintances having lost life partners have also lost homes, investments and possessions. In a form of De Facto discrimination same sex partners are forced to expect and even tolerate inequality, legal discrimination, and humiliation.
For same sex couples, legal protection is costly, complex and treacherous. Understanding and acquiring legal protection requires time, education, honest, often hard to come by legal advice, and disposable income. Contrary to popular myths regarding affluence, education and privilege in gay culture, similarities to heterosexual culture is more similar than not. Gay and Straight alike cover the entire socio-economic spectrum with near identical, scalable percentages of success, privilege, affluence and education, as well as inner-cultural, racial and gender discrimination. Yet same-sex oriented people have to endure additional hardships of legal discrimination, hate crimes and bad humor. AND, have to pay for it with extraordinary vigilance and money!
An extreme, easily debunk-able myth is that gay individuals / couples live superficially uncommitted lives, treating each other with caviler indifference. However, many maintain lifelong commitments to single partners, and families, adopted or otherwise. Many are in relationships far longer than hetero couples. Their concerns for security, safety, health, family stability and well-being are just like hetero counterparts. Yet, at any minute everything can be lost simply because they are gay. Current law supports this and unless highly tailored legal documents are in place gay couples and surviving individuals can loose everything. Imagine your mother or father being homeless at the age of 80, simply because of a difference that as slight as to barely make a difference, and perhaps you’ll understand the gravity of the gay situation.
Every form of gay bashing, supposedly innocent or otherwise, within or from outside the gay community should be seen as reprehensible and intolerable. No, Marriage is not "So Gay", as if to suggest in contemporary terms that marriage is a silly concept - marriage is fundamental to human happiness. The facts are simple: laws governing marriage are discriminatory, unjust and serve only those who insist gay people are inferior human beings.
If we support, or ignore current marriage law, we’re directly or indirectly supporting discrimination. In this regard, just as those who stood by while so many people of different race and creed suffered over history, we, too are guilty of inhumanity to humanity. It is not our place to judge [any] other human beings but to insist, for the sake of all human beings, that each and every person is treated with respect and fairness. Only in doing this will we protect our families, communities and society from the peril of discrimination, that can, and will eventually strike everyone sooner or later. In this regard the fair treatment of same sex oriented human beings provides, and matter-of-factly-is, a clear example of our relationship to humanity itself, and an indictment of our hidden sins against ourselves.
