Two Together: Gay Marriage

Article submission for Press Republican’s JILL Magazine
500 words
April 15, 2006


Today at breakfast at the local bakery I asked one couple, “Why did you get married?” Their grown children, who became a family when the couple fell in love, urged them to. I asked another couple, whose teenage son was with them, “Why did you get married?” They didn’t see why they shouldn’t: they loved each other, owned property together, were planning to start a family and be together for the rest of their lives, and there was family health insurance available to them only if they were married. Both couples have been together for many years and are happy as can be. They’re also different than you might be imagining: the couple whose grown children urged them to marry are lesbians, and the couple with the teenage son and family health insurance are gay men.

I think it is perfectly fine for people to be gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, or any variation thereof. But there is more to this than “it’s ok to be gay.” Why would two people of the same gender want to get married? First, because they love each other and want to commit to each other for life. On another level, gay people might want to get married as a step toward civil rights and equality. Yet another reason is that there are financial and legal benefits to getting married, as my husband and I learned as soon as we signed that license and started building equity. Being married makes lots of things easier for loving—or not so loving—partners. As one friend put it, “Marriages have been arranged to prevent war, accumulate wealth, unite families, get a green card, etc.”

Some people contemplate gay marriage and get stuck on the first word, “gay”. Some of my queer friends were irked when I asked them to think about marriage in the context of their own lives. One person asked why they would want to subject themselves to the likelihood of a painful and expensive divorce, since so many marriages end that way. Another said that their church is fine with them being gay as long as they don’t act on it and don’t have a partner; if they showed up in church with a beloved of the same sex, they would not be welcome any more. Sometimes things change: it used to be illegal for people of different races to marry, but those laws were changed as society evolved. Other social differences remain an obstacle to people marrying, like religious faith or economic position.

Some people think that the idea of gay marriage threatens the institution of marriage. This seems rather like pointing the finger away from the guilty party. In most places only heterosexual people can get married, and the divorce rate is terribly high, so aren’t straight people already doing a good enough job of ruining marriage? What difference would another 10% of the population make to an already wobbly institution?

Being married, to me, means making a lifelong commitment of love, partnership, and sexual monogamy. I chose to make this commitment with a person of the opposite gender. But what if the person I grew to love and cherish was another woman, and we decided to make this traditional commitment to each other? Why would that be so wrong?