In honor of the SCOTUS taking up the issue of same-sex marriage, I am posting some of my previous verses–some in celebration, others to highlight why change is needed. Oh, and it’s “Marriage Week”, not “Same-Sex Marriage Week”, because I looked at my Cuttlefish University benefits package, and throughout it, benefits are offered to “spouse or same-sex spouse”… and I thought, this is either redundant or separate-but-equal (thus, unequal). It’s just “marriage”. I’m sure the guests will figure out from context whether it’s same-sex or not, but the process is the same, and the vocabulary does not need an additional adjective.
First up, from 2011…
Our daughter’s getting married!
What a joyous, joyous day!
But we’re going to skip the wedding,
Cos you see, our daughter’s gay.
We love her more than life itself
And love her wife-to-be;
We’d never be judgmental, but
We simply can’t agree!
I mean no disrespect, of course,
I love her to the core—
It’s just that, when it comes to this,
I love religion more.
comments, after the jump:
The AP begins a story on US opinions toward same sex marriage with what to me is a heartbreaking story:
Barbara Von Aspern loves her daughter, “thinks the world” of the person her daughter intends to marry and believes the pair should have the same legal rights as anyone else. It pains her, but Von Aspern is going to skip their wedding. Her daughter, Von Aspern explains, is marrying another woman.
“We love them to death, and we love them without being judgmental,” the 62-year-old Chandler, Ariz., retiree said. “But the actual marriage I cannot agree with.”
“Without being judgmental”. This is your daughter. This is the baby girl you would have taken on a bear to protect. This is the toddler who retaught you to see the beauty in the world. This is the teenager who broke your heart every time she broke hers. This is the woman who has found the love of her life and would love to have her parents share her celebration.
I can’t imagine a force on earth that could keep me from my daughter’s wedding–I’ll be there even if it’s (*gulp*) in a church!
Love. You’re doing it wrong.
No disrespect intended.
If you claim to love your daughter and like her partner, but still can’t bring yourself to attend their wedding then you are seriously fucked up in the head. It’s a perfect example of religious brainwashing stripping people of all their humanity and decency.
It may be on a t-shirt already:
“You haven’t failed as a parent if you’ve raised a gay child.
You’ve failed as a parent if you’ve disowned one.”
That poem is a great example of how people sound when they go “I dont hate on gays or anything… I dont mind gays being gay but gay marriage I cant support.” Whatever. You’re homophobic like the rest who are rowdy about any sort of gay activity, theyre just honest about it.
Thanks!
Yes… love is not what motivates you, love is what you do. This mother’s actions show that (as I said) she’s doing love wrong.
As an attorney, I feel I should speak up in defense of that bit of verbiage.
I obviously haven’t read the rest of the document you’re quoting, but it seems very likely to me that the attorney(s) who wrote it used that formulation in order to make it as clear as possible that same-sex spouses are covered. It’s redundant, absolutely—but folks in my profession sometimes resort to redundancies if we think it’ll prevent a misreading (especially one that could lead to litigation). This seems to me a very praiseworthy redundancy.
If the drafter had left out “or same-sex spouse,” (s)he’d have been leaving the door open for a hypothetical bigoted CU administrator to deny benefits to a same-sex partner who needed those benefits. (“Spouse? You’re not a spouse!”) Adding in the redundancy cuts any such attempt at administrative homophobia off at the knees. Which is a very good thing, obviously.
So, er, Leave Gay-Friendly-Contract Drafters Alooooooone…….
Rieux–I suspect that you are precisely right, and that is exactly my point–the ideal in this situation is that such redundancies are not at all required. A redundancy–even, as you put it, a praiseworthy redundancy–may be exactly what is required and desired in the short term… but in the long term, it is “separate but equal”.
I’ll leave it alone, as you suggest, for the good of humanity… but… damn… in an ideal world, that bigoted CU administrator would not be part of our equations.
As they say… in theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice, they are not. I’ll take the word of a practicing attorney here above that of a… cephalopod.
The term separate but equal originally referred to public schools in the American South, as I’m sure you know. There were two problems:
1) The children were not learning to interact with people of other races.
2) The states were systematically stripping money out of the “black” schools to benefit the “white” schools or other state programs.
IANAL, but as I understand it, problem 2 was the one that really got the courts to demand full desegregation.
There isn’t any equivalent problem in reiterating spouses and same-sex spouses. Referring to same-sex marriages as “civil unions” “domestic partnerships” or similar terms with fewer rights attached would be somewhat equivalent to separate but equal as practiced in the schools. But until marriage between two people without regard to gender is the law of the land, specifically reiterating the rights of same-sex spouses seems like a necessary precaution.
Actually it referred to all kinds of public services and went far beyond schools. It was codified in the Plessy v. Ferguson case in 1896 which was about segregated railroad cars.
Steve84–
No, I didn’t realize it went back to Plessy v Ferguson. But the inequality of the “separate but equal” facilities was, of course, also evident in railroad cars, washrooms, water fountains, etc. The ‘separate but equal’ was never equal.