A Toast to Gay Marriage

Dear My Darling Public

     It is the truth, in recent weeks, that the LGBTQIA community has won a major victory not only for their civil rights, but for the idea of civil rights in general. The fact that two (or perhaps more) people who love one another now have the ability to express that love in the form of a lifetime commitment is one sight that I always thought I would get to see in my lifetime, and I did. That being said, the response from my more conservative counterparts has been less than graceful. With their string of cherry-picked bible references and anecdotes about television shows they used to watch when times were good, I couldn't help but notice that the main idea that they were trying to sell me was that performing a marriage is the exclusive right of the church, and that it is up to said church to define marriage, and this made me think of a conversation that I had back in March.
     I happened upon a good friend of mine a while back just before St. Patrick's Day, a friend who is fairly involved with a bearded white man that she reflexively insists on calling god, and we had a nice chat about the same topic that we cannot seem to avoid in spite of my 'good-faith' efforts: Politics. I asked her if she had given any thought to the concept of going to law school, as she had expressed interest in graduating from college with a degree in criminal justice and enjoying a particularly expensive lifestyle (because it was hard for me to believe that police officers have the necessary capital to live that way.) She, being the easy-going, 'down home' type that she is, explained that this would be a very uninvited transition because A.) It would involve living is someplace that isn't in the middle of BFE, and B.) It would involve working side by side with crazier liberals than had plagued her at the school we already attended. This is where I should have changed the topic, but I had become far too hungry for the rhetorical blood of a conservative.
     I politely asked her, with a twinkle in my eye, with what sort of pitch forks and torches have my camp been chasing her to the gallows, and she responded like clockwork. They (the liberals) are making a joke out of the bible, the almighty word of God, and mopping the floor with the constitution. Ok, now she brought the bible into the conversation, and, as all of you know, she might as well have thrown me a T-bone steak. I proceeded to ask her what her personal interpretation of the bible had to do with anybody else, and what law-abiding citizens were doing with the constitution other than honoring it as rationally legitimate, and that is when what was bothering her finally showed itself: She was unhappy with this great state of ours legitimizing same-sex marriage as it had done months before.
     Her rational was no different than that of the talking heads in the conservative media, but I cared for this person a lot, as she is one of my very best friends, so I dropped the subject. I am here today, however, to put all of you h8ers out there in your place in regard to this argument. A.) The idea of marriage has been around for centuries before Jesus walked the earth and has been a staple of culture all over the world that would have had no contact Judao-Christian spirituality, B.) There are currently four sects of Christianity that I know of that do perform same-sex marriages. and they are: The United Church of Christ, Metropolitan Community Church, The Unitarian Universalist Church, and The Unity Church, and they are just like actual church with the bibles and the sitting and the standing and the old people and all the other whosamawhatsits that go along with being a church, C.)  If we are going to have biblical marriage, we shouldn't just cherry-pick the parts we enjoy the most, we should go full circle with the good book. That's right! Let's see how long your marriage will last if you are a woman being married off to someone who sexually assaulted you (Deuteronomy 22:28-29), or a woman living out in a shed for seven days out of each month (Leviticus 15:19.) At that point, why even bother? Because the next step is eliminating pork, shellfish, rabbits, camels, or anything that does not have fins, scales, hoofs, or a cud-eating disorder from your diet (Leviticus 11: All of it.)
   At the end of the day, marriage is about being happy, and living life in a way that satisfies you while you still have life, because this life is the only one that is guaranteed to us. I mean, I don't see anybody coming back from the dead to confirm anything.

With Infinite Love
Thomas F.