Sunday, November 9, 2008

No more Mr. Nice Gay.

I'm a terrible advocate for marriage equality. Because I am too angry to be effective.

It is unacceptable that we are being asked to beg for our basic human rights. I am an adult. I pay my taxes, run a business that supports four families, volunteer at my kid’s school, and drive sober. I can change a cloth diaper without waking the baby wearing it, tune a carburetor, design a database and clean a fish.

I am a citizen of this country, and I have an unconditional right to choose my next of kin. That right wasn't discovered by the Supreme Court of CA and it can't be voted down by my neighbors. It was imbued upon me by my Creator, as the man once wrote.

The point of marriage equality is not to gain approval from strangers for our choice of life partners. It is to allow all of us to gain the dignity of choosing who will share our debts and successes.

It is to bring our lives inside the shelter of the state and the protections only the state can offer us, which is a choice many if not most couples want to make for themselves and their children.

The self-appointed moralists who want to fence my family outside of marriage will not stop there. What we’ve seen is that they will not stop until they have walled us out of every form of protection that exists.

In cooperating with religious nutters to send us the message that our families are less moral, California voters are complicit in disinheriting my child and burdening my mother with the responsibility of being my closest relative for the rest of her life.

The notion that I am expected to politely supplicate my fellow citizens to prevent them from permanently reducing me, and everyone who shares my minority orientation, to a conditional status that is not quite full adulthood, is just repellent.

I don’t want another chance to plead for fairness from voters—I want to set something on fire.

How dare they suggest that we are less entitled to the only available system to protect our children’s inheritances and fundamental rights? How dare they imply that I chose to go without the protections of community-property law, by being born this way?

It’s outrageous that they assault our families and expect us to be polite in our dissent. My marriage is not a political question on which reasonable people can differ. Only an unreasonable bigot could think otherwise.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Oh, that is wonderful phoenix... please post as a diary on PHB...and I will ask Pam to promote!!
Orion45