Dismissed…Very Much with Prejudice

It wasn’t an easy day, yesterday—but it ended well and I got through it, and there are days where that’s…well, not more than enough, but at least all you’re going to get.

It started even before I had gotten out of bed, or even before I had gotten fully conscious: a federal judge here in Puerto Rico had the previous day dismissed with prejudice a case brought by Ada Conde, a local gay activist, asking the court to order the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico to honor her marriage to her spouse. The two were married ten years ago in Massachusetts.

Normally, news in other, stodgier, locations is read by a broadcaster, but here? True, they did read the news, but then turned to an irascible discussion of it: before I was vertical, I had been told—OK, shouted—that marriage was defined as a relationship between a man and a woman, and that we couldn’t change that definition. One of the shouters, then, adduced the case of champagne—the sparkling wine from the French district of the same name—since the vintners in Champagne had taken everyone producing a sparkling wine and calling it “champagne” to court and forced them to use another name. See? Champagne is from Champagne, and marriage is between a man and a woman! Case closed!

Well, I was pondering all this over coffee, and wondering whether caffeine-resistance was a medical / biological possibility, when I read the judge’s opinion—OK, I read the choice bits of it presented in the paper. And here I have to report: the reasoning of the “champagne / marriage” analogy was a lot tighter than the judge’s.

We’re told that the “traditional” family consisting of a man and a woman whose one aim is procreation is the fundamental building block of society. Then the judge warns us that venturing on a redefinition of matrimony will push us down that slick and slippery slope smack into the pits of incest and polygamy.

Legally, Pérez Giménez—finally to give the judge his name—seems to have done something rather strange: he cites a 1972 summary affirmation of the U.S. Supreme Court, Baker v Nelson, which upheld Minnesota’s gay marriage ban. What doesn’t he do? Cite the case of Windsor, in which the majority of judges determined that the defense of marriage act—well, it’s been thrown out, so why capitals?—“violates basic due process and equal protection principles.”

Wait—who said that “duh???” out there?

Well, the article I was reading—one of them—called the judge’s ruling “comically inane,” and Pérez Giménez does appear to think he’s doing something wonderfully daring and retro: stating that only the legislature can redefine marriage, and that all those district courts north of us have overstepped their bounds. But is little Puerto Rico going to put up with that? NO!

I then came upon a picture of the judge, and it was unilateral loathing at first sight. Here he is, and 24 hours later, I still want to smack him:

So I stormed into the Poet’s Passage and sat at a table, and then Lady strolled in, and sat with me.

“Where’d you get married,” I asked her, and she told me: a basement in Hato Rey, the business district of San Juan.

“There was a rapist in the room next to us and a drug lord on the other side,” she reported.

Right—a courthouse wedding, just like Raf’s and mine—though not, since Lady and her husband had hopped in the car a driven a mile or two to get married. Me? I left an ailing mother in Wisconsin one day during a furious snowstorm, missed a flight in Miami, traveled to San Juan, and took a flight 3000 miles to Boston, only to endure Act II of the same storm. So we got the license and waited the three days and traversed the river to the city hall of acceptable age and architecture.

Right—so then I was espousing a favorite theory of Mr. Fernández: marriage is a legal, not a religious, concept. What does that mean? Obviously, instead of talking about “civil unions,” we should be talking about “religious unions.” You know—those things that take place in a church, where the woman wears a ridiculous dress that she’ll never wear again, and the guy is wearing a suit that at least is rented—not bought—and everybody cries and takes pictures. So Lady and I are both married—we just blew off the religious union!

Well, in the state of mind that had descended—the emotional climate had deteriorated from stormy to hurricanely—I then proposed what should be obvious: barring the clergy from signing marriage licenses! What gives them the right to sign a legal document? And that meant that the only people who could sign the damn things were judges and magistrates, who had the legal training….

Right—then the atmospheric pressure plummeted, the shear winds decreased, and the system became more organized (or so it felt to me). I then suggested that we take off our gloves—we liberals who have been so politically correct and “respectful” of everybody’s insane religious beliefs. Where had it gotten us?

Things got so bad, in fact, that I ended the post…well, here it is:

            …and God?

           

            My enemy for life!

All that was bad enough, and then the Ottawa shootings began—so of course I had to follow that, and ruminate on how fragile a tissue our civilization is: a lone gunman brings the capitol of Canada to its knees, for an afternoon, at least.

There are days when the only thing I can do is to leave the poor world spinning forlornly in space, turn off the lights in the sala poética, the performance area next to the café, and play Bach Suites. So I did, and if the world didn’t listen to me, well, I had stopped listening to it—so that was all right.

Then a class, then the opera Macbeth, where young Montalvo—at age 21 decades younger than the mean age of the audience—diagnosed the central problem of the opera / play, after both Raf and I suggested that Lady Macbeth might be the central character of the whole thing. This made no sense to Montalvo, who cited Otello—the only other Shakespearean play / opera that Montalvo has seen. Would we argue that Iago—who is the architect of so much evil—was the main character? So we were tackling this, when Montalvo, with very much the energy and the voice of a 21-year old, summed it all up…

“…the problem was just that bitch!”

So he sailed off into the night on his motorcycle, and we went home. Today, of course, I’m over it.

The days will pass, the case will be appealed, the First Circuit Court will rule, and at some point, on some day, the Supreme Court is going to have to look at the 32 states who have marriage equality and the 18 states that don’t and decide: does that make sense? And in the meantime?

Well, we’ll be going to the opera, or taking a kid to the opera, and sneaking peeks at him to see if he’s engaged, and discussing that old question of the tragic flaw and whether it exists and if so, what is it—in Otello or Macbeth, and by the way, why isn’t the opera called Macbeto?

And also in the meantime?

…I may have a nodding acquaintance with God….