I used to feel like Peter Pan, who watched Wendy Darling play with her family. "There could not have been a lovelier sight; but there was none to see it except a little boy who was staring in at the window. He had ecstasies innumerable that other children can never know; but he was looking through the window at the one joy from which he must be forever barred" (J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan).

I felt barred from the happiness that comes from family simply because I was gay because that's what I learned growing up as a Mormon. I have since come to know that I am not barred from this happiness, and that I can have all the joys associated with family.

Sunday, January 9, 2011

I Think I Want to Marry You

If individuals have the right to choose their spouse, and if spouses are equal partners without different gender-defined roles, then gay couples have the right to marry. Many today -- including the Mormons -- do believe men and women have distinct roles in marriage, and therefore don't believe gay couples can marry, but as far as our society is concerned, these changes have already happened. Gender equality is a legal and social reality now, and so, therefore, is gay marriage.

There's a great editorial today making this point in the Washington Post:
Gay marriage isn't revolutionary. It's just next.
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1 comments:

Rob said...

FWIW, this point was one of the central themes of Judge Walker's opinion: gender roles no longer exist as a uniformly accepted and legally compulsory component of marriage, and CA law in particular has explicitly revoked such gender-based roles, thus, there's no longer any reason to require as a matter of secular CA law that the spouses be of two separate genders.

Those who wail about "destroying traditional marriage" should look for "culprits" not to supporters of same-sex marriage but to social movements that began decades ago and, no doubt, to their own complicity in much of the changes--IF they're intellectually honest.

January 9, 2011 9:16 AM

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