It wasn’t meant to be political.
In fact, Saturday night, while beautiful, was pretty conventional: two of my dear friends from graduate school were getting married. They are fellow economists who have spent 18 years together; they have supported each other through their careers, each has followed the other to different cities, and they provide each other with support in their personal lives.
The only difference is that Jed and Eric are both men.
In many respects, their wedding followed the script I’ve celebrated as my other graduate school buddies have married. Friends and family were assembled, and the lucky couple were excited and busy hosts, making sure that all the details were in place.
But there were differences. The timing of their wedding had little to do with the progress of their relationship. It is pretty unusual for a couple to wait 18 years to marry. But in this case, their choice reflects the fact that they were legally unable to move ahead until the California Supreme Court ruled that the state’s Constitution recognizes their right to marriage. And they were forced to rush their wedding ahead of next week’s election, as a ballot initiative (Prop 8) seeks to take away this right by amending the constitution.
And so circumstances dictated that their love and their wedding, while being intensely personal, was also somehow public and political.
In a symbolically loaded part of their ceremony, an African-American friend invited them to “jump the broom.” During slavery, society refused to recognize the rights of many African-Americans to marry. Despite this, marriage — formalized by a couple jumping over a broom — continued to thrive. Today, we recognize those earlier marriage bans as a gross historical injustice.
The thing that struck me about their ceremony was how viscerally it changed my own feelings about gay marriage. I had always supported gay marriage, but it was an abstract, intellectual support; now it’s personal. And so a friend’s wedding became, for me, the most compelling political event of the year.
Here’s an interesting thought: How has the recent wave of same-sex weddings changed the political landscape? There have now been thousands of same-sex weddings, each enjoining scores of invited friends and family to re-examine their thoughts and feelings. There’s a pretty good chance that one of these folks might be the pivotal voter on Tuesday. And I suspect that this is a much more motivating political force than the tens of millions being spent on political advertising.
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What was more important – getting homosexuality out of the DSM or allowing gay marriage?
should gay marriage really be a question of tax and contract law?
If 50 years, this current conservative hysteria over “gay marriage” will seem as quaint as the anti mixed race marriage laws from 50 years go.
@discordian: Help me understand your post? Homosexuality was removed from the DSM in 1973. There is still a diagnosis of “sexual disorder not otherwise specified,” which is meant to be used for “persistent and marked distress about sexual orientation.” I don’t think that is the equivalent of diagnosing homosexuality as a disorder, since distress about one’s sexual orientation seems a legitimate problem.
Hey ptk
should marriage (any marriage) really be a question of tax and contract law?
The church I grew up in has been performing marriages for gay couples for decades so I can’t say I have ever had the experience of seeing it in any way as abnormal. Yet it never ceases to surprise me that something which seems like it can objectively be considered wholly good for all parties involved could encounter so much opposition.
Even the counterarguments that homosexuality is not an immutable trait and therefore not deserving of protected class status fail against scientific evidence such as this demonstrating that biological gender and sexual orientation is not a binary trait.
Furthermore, it is shocking to me that the rights of a minority group could be threatened by the majority in the form of a ballot initiative.
I do believe that our collective humanity can stand up against bigotry in this instance, but I thought I’d help it along so I donated to NoOnProp8.com and so can you.
@megan in Seattle…
I’m aware it was removed…Just thinking along the lines that if it was still classified as a disorder then gay mariage really couldn’t be made legal, right?
The problem is some SERIOUSLY right wing people would like to see it put back in as a disorder…
As a gay woman, I hear the “in 50 years” line a lot. The foreign-born partner of a friend of mine will be sent back to her country in a few months, because they can’t marry. A loving male couple I know might not be able to adopt because they have to jump through hoops to prove their relationship is “stable” (after 12 years of partnership). Every time I meet someone new I know a good portion of my neighbors won’t consider any relationship we have as “real.” Marriage matters, and it matters today.