Letter to the Nine

Let me make it very simple for the nine men and women who make up the Supreme Court.

John and Mary have a lovely wedding in a quaint, white, tall-steeple church. The parents beam, the bride cries, the groom shifts nervously at the altar. The ceremony concludes, they sign the marriage license, and drive off to their honeymoon in the Bahamas, where John will be eaten by a shark.

Are they married?

John and Mary have a lovely wedding—this is a copy / paste of the previous paragraph, so feel free to skip it—in a quaint, white, tall-steeple church. The parents beam, the bride cries, the groom shifts nervously at the altar. The ceremony concludes, they forget to sign—and here the scenario changes—the marriage license, and drive off to their honeymoon in the Bahamas, where John will be eaten by a shark.

Are they married?

Or how about this—John and Mary plan to get married in that quaint-et-cetera church, but it burns down the night before the wedding (dear me, the dramatic things that are happening in the blog this morning….). So they get hitched at City Hall, and then go off to that fateful honeymoon.

You get—I’m sure—my point. Where a couple is married has absolutely no importance; what’s important is that famous or fatal signature on a legal document called the marriage certificate. So we have a problem, a language problem. And here it is….

Screw talking about civil unions, we should be talking about religious unions.

It’s another sign of how decades of fundamentalist battering have driven us into logical and linguistic corners. Nobody, of course, can claim to be a liberal—now we have to retrench under the term “progressive.” Nobody can come right out and say that marriage is a legal institution, and that no amount of fiddling with “civil unions” can grant exactly the same rights as marriage. And even if it could, why bother?

I live across the street from a man and woman who are, I believe (since I haven’t seen their marriage certificate), married. The man and the woman live across the street from two men—do I need to tell you who they are?—who were married in the state of Massachusetts in 2008.

So Raf and Julio go off to the beach, and guess what happens? Yes, we now have a very well fed shark, swimming happily in those bloody waters. Now then, what happens to the grieving spouses?

Well, it’s a very different story. There’s Social Security, there are the tax laws, there are inheritance and probate issues.

Two very different scenarios. But oddly, the two couples—from what I can see—lead quite similar lives. Couples do—they figure out who does the cooking, the cleaning, the laundry. They figure out where they’re going to live and how to pay the bills. They have pets and arguments and—sometimes—children.

And isn’t it time, at last, to get over it, to get on to other things?

Or maybe it’s time to get pissed. Because that’s where I am, this morning, as I read about the Supreme Court weaseling around the question of whether two guys who have been together thirty years, who spent thousands of bucks to travel hundreds of miles to get married are in fact married.

Maybe it’s time to get out on the streets and start screaming at the people who have screamed at us, who have held up the “God hates fags” signs—yes, they were there yesterday, exercising their free speech in front of the Supreme Court—and shout was should be obvious to everybody.

Oh, and what’s that?

Try this….

The people defining marriage as a heterosexual union are mean-spirited, petty bigots.

No, not strong enough.

Hate-filled, fear-filled, despicable bigots.

And remind me, again—why did we allow them to take over the discourse?