marydell | Marriage is keen! (profanity alert!)

Copy this sentence into your livejournal if you're in a ~~heterosexual marriage~~ legally privileged relationship and you don't want it "protected" by the bigots who think that gay marriage hurts it somehow.

------------------------
My own thoughts: I like being married. I do find it different from being shacked up or various other things. I want every adult human in this country to have the right to be married. What particularly irritates me [after the basic problem of denial of rights based on orientation] is that when opponents start making the case that gay marriage is a gateway drug, leading to polygamous and child and bestial marriages. My take on that? A child can't legally consent to sex; nor can an animal, and I don't think they can consent on a spiritual or whatever level either. So there's NO FUCKING NEED to worry about that in regard to marriage laws and whatnot. Polygamy or other non-standard marriage arrangements? WHO THE FUCK CARES? God doesn't want me to be in a monogamous hetero marriage, *I* do, and my husband does, so that's our particular lifestyle choice. Other people have other lifestyle choices, that work as well or as badly as mine, depending entirely on how lovingly and honestly and intelligently those choice are executed. NOT on how much they look like a picture of the Way Things Are Supposed to Be. Does it startle me a little when I encounter someone who does things differently from me? Yes. But it also fascinates me, and charms me. None of those reactions has anything to do with morality, or love, or what people are meant to do, or what should be legal.

And as for the very common argument against any non-traditional home/family arrangement--the children the children, think of the children-- children need stability, predictable loving care, an opportunity to thrive. It doesn't have to be traditional. The extra parent figure in my family when I was growing up is a lot of the reason I've turned out as sane as I have...mine wasn't a family that could stand well on a two-person foundation.

So, rant rant rant. Marriage is great. I LOVE being married. But to me marriage means "I have legally bound my life and another person's life together, for the purposes of love, companionship, and sex, at the same time as having a sacred private covenant between me and that person." It doesn't mean "I am choosing to be a subordinate creature in a chattel relationship with a man." Everyone should have the opportunity, if they desire it, to experience marriage in the first sense. And marriage in the second sense...well, fuck that.