From the 'No on 1' Campaign Headquarters

You know, I wasn’t always a big gay. For more than half of my life so far, I did not self-identify as queer.

In fact, the number of years I’ve had to think about marriage are about three-to-one the number of years I’ve had to think about queerness. I’ve encountered marriage as a child, as a teen, as a straight-by-default, as a closeted queer, as an out queer, as a married queer, as a Lutheran, as a Mormon, and as a person with enough Comparative Religion credits to need several paragraphs to express their spiritual perspective.

So I was very surprised to learn something about marriage while volunteering for the “No on 1″ campaign in Maine. I was calling a list of people who had expressed interest in supporting the campaign previously. I was calling to ask them to do whatever they could to get the vote out on the big day.

I placed a call to a number of an 84-year old gentleman we’ll call “John.” A younger woman answered the phone, and she told me John wasn’t available. I said, “Well, maybe I can speak with you? <smile> My name is Ami and I’m calling from the “No on 1″ campaign.”

And then the most appalling thing happened.

She said: “You don’t need to speak to me. We’re Yes on 1.” Then she hung up.

I know, I know: for a seasoned cold caller, that would be a very gentle let-down. But after a lifetime of having it insinuated, but not said to my face, it was a real shock to hear someone say: “I don’t believe you should be able to marry anyone. Ever. Because of ‘how you are.’”

Usually, I’m live-and-let-live to a fault. But this call changed my perspective for good. Having had several run-ins with religion in my childhood, I still thought of marriage in a religious framework. I hadn’t really conceived of it as a right. I hadn’t really realized that people thought they could take it away from me!

This woman’s fear and righteousness are the basis of the fight against same-sex marriage, and what they fail to see is: Marriage, although I believe it to be a spiritual endeavor, is not a religious institution. It is a civil institution. Their side struggles to ‘defend marriage,’ when really that’s like defending business licenses, or any other civil procedure. Defend land use permits! Defend parking tickets!

What do they mean when they say “Defend marriage”, then? They want to confuse the meaning of the word marriage with as much (muddily-worded and religious-laced) rhetoric as possible.  Take for instance (from the Yes on 1 website):

If Question 1 fails and LD 1020 is allowed to take effect, marriage will be redefined to be about any two consenting adults without regard to gender, the focus being only about what the adults want for themselves, and not what is best for society as a whole. [Because personal fulfillment damages society? Down with the pursuit of happiness!] The roles of husbands and wives would become irrelevant. [I know a lot of straight people that would love to define their own roles, so this is just super. In fact, the happiest, longest term marriages I can think of are based on non-gender specific, personally-fulfilling, self-identified roles. Huh.] The reliance on marriage as an important fabric of society will no longer matter, [I know there's not a language arts pre-req for writing things on the internet, but this metaphor is so ludicrous that I'm straining to get a point at all. If anyone can locate a subject or a verb in all that circular reasoning, please email me a diagram.] and the marriage laws will not consider what is best for children. [Flat out not true...says WebMD, the American Medical Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, American Psychiatric Association--the list grows with the years.]

To all you Yes on 1 folks in Maine, to all you Reject R-71 folks back home in Washington, to the DOMA supporters and to anyone out there that thinks same-sex marriage is ruining something or taking something away from them: I’m fighting for marriage because marriage isn’t yours to give. 

Marriage isn’t just for straight white male landowners. (Although wouldn’t that be just a bit gay!?) Marriage isn’t just for the people in power, or the people who think they know what’s “right” for everyone else. Marriage is a civil right. It’s my civil right.

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