I Have A Problem With ‘Gay’ Marriage
Not to be cheesy, but every day I’m tremendously grateful for the life that I have. Although at times I’m a raging cynic and also can’t go a day without the incessant usage of hyperboles about how much my day sucks, for the most part I’ve been blessed with a pretty good life. I have a job (with discretionary income), accessible (higher) education, a home, loved ones, and pretty decent basic human rights. If I want to vote in the next national election, I can. If I accidentally get pregnant and want to terminate the pregnancy, I can (unless I live down south. Boo, down south). If I want to get married, I can, but more importantly, I won’t have to worry about it being labeled as a “gay” marriage. Because seriously, what the hell is a “gay marriage” anyway? Like, is your marriage gay? Is it an exceptionally jovial lifelong commitment? Because if that’s the case, I’ll reconsider my current disdain for the whole institution and rejoin Tinder in the hopes of landing me a real man. But that’s not what we mean when we call the union of two people with the same reproductive organs a “gay” marriage, now is it?
We’ve become so accustomed to addressing this event as such that we haven’t realized just how offensive it actually sounds. Saying you’re a supporter of “gay” marriage is parallel to saying you’re a supporter of “Puerto Rican” marriage. Or “people under 5’7” marriage, or “people with two eyes” marriage or basically just “humans getting married”. How unnecessary and ridiculous is it to label a type of marriage?! Human life, like attraction and sexuality, although fluid, isn’t extremely complicated. But because we as humans are so obsessed with the lives of others, we turn something basic into something so complex by forcing each other to cling to all these labels and titles. Bisexual, Muslim, Republican, pansexual, atheist, Democrat, blah, blah, blah. All of these terms annoyingly attached to a person like a nametag at an office holiday mixer so we can identify ourselves, and each other, and scream out into the world “HEY! THIS IS WHO I AM…is it okay?” Pretend a relative is telling you about one of their friends’ impending marriage. The first thing you respond with wouldn’t be “Wow, that’s great. Will it be a ‘straight’ marriage?” right? Of course not, because that’s absurd. So why are we still so hell bent on categorizing the marriage between two lady-kissers? It’s about to be 2015 A.D. for Christ’s sake.
I truly hope that in the not so distant future all “types” of marriages will be awarded the decency to be referred to as that, simply a “marriage.” There are much more important things to be channeling our energy and time into rather than focusing on how to classify the union of two people. Regardless of who the two people deciding to commit themselves to each for a lifetime are, there shouldn’t be a discussion about the sorting of the race, ethnicity, sexual identity/preference/orientation, religious following, political affiliations of the couple. It all seems a tad ridiculous to me and we should be focusing on the fact that these people have decided to spend the rest of their lives with just this one person (which alone is pretty crazy. I mean, one person? Forever? No one else? Ever? #nothanks). But seriously, we need to do better.