Gay Marriage Has Failed to Destroy the World
The reason to get married should be that you want to get married. We should be wary of rights, which are “given” to us and will just as easily be taken away. No wonder they call the right the right — they’re constantly panicked that someone will strip theirs from them, their guns, their god.
We have bigger fish to fry than the whole roast branzino that is Gay Marriage, but it remains an issue. Deathless ghoul and former Kentucky Country Clerk Kim Davis, who in 2015 had to stamp some papers and got scared, is fixing to bring her personal damage up to the Supreme Court once again. In 2023, a federal jury ordered her to pay $100,000 in damages to the gay couple she refused to issue a marriage license to; she just lost an appeal before the Sixth Circuit Court on the grounds of Obergefell. The likely next step is to ask the Supreme Court to hear Davis’s case.
The way the right talks about gay marriage reflects the way much of America thinks about queer people. Gay people were psychopaths and therefore they should not marry; if they were from another country, they should be deported. Remove homosexuality from the DSM but instead see gay men as vectors of bodily disease. Perhaps they should marry, Andrew Sullivan reasoned, for the sake of public health.
There’s no wrong way to make a family, but it should be enshrined in the Constitution that a family exists between two women and a Pomeranian. The first time it occurred to me I wanted to get married, it was during a health crisis: I was scared to not have her by my side, scared that one day I’d be relegated to the hall as a friend, a girl friend, a buddy. That we wouldn’t have rights. She pointed out to me that this wasn’t very romantic. When we did tie the knot, it was an act of romance and pleasure and promise. We just had our first anniversary of the best night of our lives.
When I showed Emily, my wife, this little essay, here is what she had to add: “We are made to respect the business contract of two humans as opposed to seeing the inherent worthiness of a life. To live together is difficult, which is why it is at the same time economic and romantic — you’re sharing a space, a life. Capitalist systems want to control the act of sharing so we don’t do it too much, too deeply or without oversight.”
(Joel Grey and Liza Minnelli breathe the word “money” into each other’s mouths.)
An acquaintance tells me she knows someone who was extorted $50,000 to get married and stay in the country. She herself had to pay less, but is still paying it. I am angry, I am angry, but most of all I’m angry because gay marriage has not done what the zealots said it would do: end the world the right holds dear. Polygamy should be running wild now; I should be able to marry every beautiful person in the world so that they can live freely where they want thanks to the bonds of eternal love, which bind us all together anyway. ––Natalie Adler