Massachusetts Wedding Bells On My Birthday

It’s a great day. Not because it’s my birthday, though that’s undoubtedly cause for greatness (33 years old and all!) but because of what is taking place in Massachusetts today. There's no overstatement in saying that it's simply barbaric that it took this country until now (and it's still only a single state) to welcome the gay community into what is fundamentally an egalitarian institution. I was literally moved to tears this afternoon as I listened to couples exchanging their vows on NPR. It's about time.

When Cathy and I married a few years back, we made it abundantly clear just how much we were upset by the fact that we were entering into a club, one endowed with over 1200 special rights, that was egregiously exclusive, barring as it did an entire population of stable, loving people access to the instituion because of cruel and misguided prejudices.

There is obviously a long way to go and anti-gay marriage groups are highly organized, well funded and incredibly threatened by these events. They're working each day to smear the gay community as harbingers of the destruction of the family (hell, they can't bring children into the world, and surely even those children they are raising are worse off then children raised by all those hetero couples and their 50% divorce rates, right?)and man on dog couplings. They're mobilizing to pass amendments banning gay marriage in those states that haven't already passed such legislation and George Bush is tossing them red meat by calling for ammending the Constituion to ban it across the nation. Take that, fags! ("Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this Constitution nor the constitution of any state, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups.")But according to a New York Times article in yesterday's paper, attempts to organize congregations against the threat of gay marriage has been met, for the most part, with indifference. Folks, it seems, are more concerned about finding or keeping their jobs, raising their kids, the increasingly grim situation in Iraq and simply putting food on the table instead of imagining the Sodom and Gomorrah of gay marriage. I hope this inertia only continues to build up steam!

In any case, let the wedding bells ring! Welcome to the club! There's plenty of room for all.