by Matt Barr

Happily married, or something

The government shouldn't have anything to do with who gets "legally" married and who doesn't in the first place. If it's going to "recognize" (how thoughtful of it) marriage between an adult man and an adult woman it ought to "recognize" a similar arragement between two people of the same sex. Ohio, to put it another way, is f---ed up.

But all that said, this gay marriage nonsense (latest here, via Below the Beltway) annoys the hell out of me.

There is not one state in this union, not one, that prohibits someone from getting married based on his or her sexual orientation. Any gay adult in America can get married who wants to. Any one. But wait! We want to marry each other! Get it? Right, I get it. Well, you can't. Let me know how I can help with the civil union law or whatever.

But a man's reach should exceed his grasp etc., so nobody wants civil unions anymore, they want "marriage." And it's not a matter of underestimating the difficulty of getting that done, I'm convinced. The gay marriage movement is working. Which is another reason to stop whining about it.

Let's say I ran things and the government put up its stop signs and deployed its air forces (with tons of gay pilots, I might add) but had nothing to do with who married whom. Gay couples would go around telling everybody they were married. Then they'd get looked at funny, and people would mumble about how strange they were when they were out of earshot. "I wonder which one pretends to be the woman?" People would see such a relationship for what it was: A presumably committed, wonderful, productive, even formalized relationship between two gay people. They wouldn't consider it "marriage," because that's not what it would be.

You want gay marriage, you start trying to get laws passed -- wait, what the hell am I saying. You try and get courts to say the law already requires gay marriage. You challenge Defense of Marriage Acts. You shoot, in the face of overwhelmingly bad odds, for the moon, something called "gay marriage," and every time a court in Washington or New York or somewhere rules against you, and every time dullards in Ohio pass a draconian constitutional amendment forbidding the use of the word "wedding" within 500 feet of a homosexual, the press coverage gets the term and concept "gay marriage" drilled further into everybody's head.

It's brilliant and I admire it as a strategy. But it means please stop complaining about how awful things are. You can get married any old time you want, anywhere in this country. And because your advocates are aiming high and ostensibly trying to agitate for the right to "marry" everywhere, supposedly suffering crushing setback after crushing setback, in 20 years or less laws against gay marriage are going to look like laws against interracial marriage look now.

How much better do you want things to be for you on this issue?

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