[img]139|left|Jessica Gadsden||no_popup[/img]
I don’t support gay marriage.
Please, put the daggers away.
This is not an essay in support of Prop. 8. Nor is it anti-gay.
I think every couple (or for that matter, group) of consenting adults who choose to form a family should have the same rights regardless of its composition.
But I don’t support gay marriage because I don’t support the idea of marriage in general.
It is the state or federal government’s sanction of what is fundamentally a religious institution. And that is something with which I disagree.
When the occasional zealot gets through my filter, and I hear them doggedly preach that their God or their Bible says that marriage is a religious institution between one man and one woman, I reluctantly agree.
Marriage may not have always been hand in hand with religion, but many religions have done their best to gain control over the definition of marriage as the quintessential and fundamental family institution. I have no objection to these developments, such as they are.
What I find objectionable is the governmental adoption of these religious beliefs. In the interests of full disclosure, I have been married for 11 years.
May I Have Insurance?
As unsentimental as it may sound, I got married for the health insurance. My then-boyfriend and I were living quite contentedly when I had to make an unexpected trip to the emergency room.
My diagnosis: a simple bladder infection. The cost for my examination, lab test, and antibiotics was$1600. I had no insurance, and having just finished graduate school $120,000 in debt, no money.
My then-boyfriend had the luxury of a job with the United States government with all its attendant benefits – including inexpensive and comprehensive health care coverage. I wanted in.
Freelancing for several newspapers and temp’ing for a greeting card company were doing nothing to protect me from the financial devastation of catastrophic illness. Marriage seemed like the perfect option. Not only would I get healthcare, but I would get other benefits like a lower tax rate, and I could continue to pursue my writing career.
Guess Who Is the Exception?
Unfortunately, my hopes for a quick civil service ceremony were dashed by several generations of professional wedding partiers in my family. It turns out everyone, except me, loves a wedding. To give everyone the party they craved, we decided to plan as small and understated of an affair as we could.
It was a cold slap in the face when I discovered that the state of Ohio, my temporary home, required that every wedding be solemnized. Running home to look up that ten-dollar word, I discovered that my unabridged Merriam-Webster defined solemnization as a celebration with religious rites. It conjured up the vision of naked dancing around a bloody sacrificial animal.
Two families with a number of devout atheists were going to be required to attend a religious ceremony? I just hoped my family, friends and soon-to-be in laws didn’t keel over in the aisle.
I dug deeper. Surely, I thought, I could find some nice justice of the peace to marry us in an outside, non-church, non-temple ceremony. Alas, it wasn’t to be.
The state law was pretty specific about who could marry you. Trust me, I checked — twice. The options were a duly ordained or licensed minister registered with the Secretary of the State, a judge, a mayor, or the superintendent of the state school for the deaf. Leaving out the last option, I wasn’t on the VIP list that gets you a judge or your local town mayor.
Go Light on Religion
The hunt for the least religious ordained minister began. It was a long search. I never knew which made most ministers balk – the fact that we were an interracial couple, that my fiancé was an ethnic Jew, that my maid of honor was a lesbian, or that we preferred no mention of God during the ceremony.
Let us just say there was a very short line of people willing to solemnize our unholy union. It was ironic that most people thought not having racially diverse cake topper was our biggest problem.
I realize Midwestern Ohio is not California, but I think the effort to legalize gay marriage, state by state, across the United States, is leading us down a semantic slippery slope that will make it all too easy to outlaw, whether it’s by U.S. Constitutional amendment or otherwise.
I say we let the religious believers of all stripes have marriage. They co-opted it, and they can keep it. In the interests of the separation of church and state in this theoretically secular country, I would much rather all states adopt civil union laws. Some local official can recognize our chosen union, gay or straight. And we can have our tax breaks, and health care, and inheritance rights, and that last deathbed visit.
For those who want to involve their minister, or priest, or rabbi, more power to them. The religious can keep their monopoly on marriage.
This is the second bi-weekly essay by Ms. Gadsden, a reformed lawyer and practicing novelist.
