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pseydtonne"Do you take this fool's last name to screw up those monogrammed hankies your aunt bought you? To have and to hold, or to tell off with greater effect, from this day until you get more expensive legal counsel, so long as you both can stand it?
"And do you take this other bozo, whom you considered a consolation prize after your last sweetie stole your car? In sickness and other forms of depravity? For richer, and.... hah! Focus on the poorer. Till death stares you in the face and you no longer blink?
"I now pronounce you contractually obligated. You may now fight about something irrelevant while the rest of us eat expensive but lousy cake."
I'm both a cynic and an optimist. I am scared of getting married. I still plan to do it. It's a fascinating time to live in Massachusetts, the center of a maelstrom about the one thing most men dread doing. Normally I’d make an LJ-cut here but this is too important and decently short.
Gay marriage makes civic sense. However, I'm not under the delusion "marriage is love". My buddy in Cambridge made and excellent case and so does this brilliant satire. Long story short: marriage is power. It's the power of two people giving up certain individual rights (the right to absquatulate *, the right to be a whiny brat all the time) to gain a union against the world. Some folks can't deal with that and will throw up any objection because they fear the power of "happily ever after" for independent-minded people.
However, gay marriage has also become the first massive missive of the LJ world. Everyone and his lobster is talking about it on this blog system. It wears out anyone that would want to talk about it because the same memes and obnoxion are all over the place. Everyone agrees around here, too. I have yet to find an LJ post from someone against gay marriage, but I'll admit I didn't go looking.
The task ahead is to focus the argument into a cohesive attack against the "one man, one woman, ten bridesmaids in the worst outfits and one broke father" crowd. We need to reassure them that no one is asking the Catholic or any other church to conduct gay weddings. All we want are the same legal protections for same-sex couples that can only come from the term "married" because of the billions of other legal documents that use the term exclusively. No straight couple is really going to get a "civil union" because no insurance policy nor mortgage application has a tick box for it; why should gay couples suffer? We need to explain the civil versus religious distinction. We also need to point out what my buddy Devon said:
"These imbeciles keep talking about the traditional marriage. Traditional marriages are the medieval version, where two families join together for the protection of each other's land. It wasn't about a man and a woman; it was about crossing the blood lines to form a bigger army."
I'll bet you dimes to doughnuts these "one man, one woman, one Percy Sledge platter" folks, even the married ones, wouldn't go to war to defend the honor of their in-laws. These are the same hosers that invented mother-in-law jokes.
I had to explain the matter to a coworker today. I felt really fuqyng juiced that I changed his mind. Now we all have a job to do.
By the way, I watched Iron Jawed Angels on Sunday night. It was about the radical suffragist movement in America. It annoyed me that everyone was supposed to be in the Belle Epoque and then the Last Colonial War (oh, sorry... World War One) but the soundtrack was cloyingly modern. However, the visceral effect of the flick was there. Mawkish, preachy, but it has good parts. It relates to what is going on today in this fight.
-Elvis loves you and he can marry you in Vegas... coming soon to Somerville
*: absquatulate: to get up from one squat or place and leave. I learned that one from a weird SAT vocabulary list.
"And do you take this other bozo, whom you considered a consolation prize after your last sweetie stole your car? In sickness and other forms of depravity? For richer, and.... hah! Focus on the poorer. Till death stares you in the face and you no longer blink?
"I now pronounce you contractually obligated. You may now fight about something irrelevant while the rest of us eat expensive but lousy cake."
I'm both a cynic and an optimist. I am scared of getting married. I still plan to do it. It's a fascinating time to live in Massachusetts, the center of a maelstrom about the one thing most men dread doing. Normally I’d make an LJ-cut here but this is too important and decently short.
Gay marriage makes civic sense. However, I'm not under the delusion "marriage is love". My buddy in Cambridge made and excellent case and so does this brilliant satire. Long story short: marriage is power. It's the power of two people giving up certain individual rights (the right to absquatulate *, the right to be a whiny brat all the time) to gain a union against the world. Some folks can't deal with that and will throw up any objection because they fear the power of "happily ever after" for independent-minded people.
However, gay marriage has also become the first massive missive of the LJ world. Everyone and his lobster is talking about it on this blog system. It wears out anyone that would want to talk about it because the same memes and obnoxion are all over the place. Everyone agrees around here, too. I have yet to find an LJ post from someone against gay marriage, but I'll admit I didn't go looking.
The task ahead is to focus the argument into a cohesive attack against the "one man, one woman, ten bridesmaids in the worst outfits and one broke father" crowd. We need to reassure them that no one is asking the Catholic or any other church to conduct gay weddings. All we want are the same legal protections for same-sex couples that can only come from the term "married" because of the billions of other legal documents that use the term exclusively. No straight couple is really going to get a "civil union" because no insurance policy nor mortgage application has a tick box for it; why should gay couples suffer? We need to explain the civil versus religious distinction. We also need to point out what my buddy Devon said:
"These imbeciles keep talking about the traditional marriage. Traditional marriages are the medieval version, where two families join together for the protection of each other's land. It wasn't about a man and a woman; it was about crossing the blood lines to form a bigger army."
I'll bet you dimes to doughnuts these "one man, one woman, one Percy Sledge platter" folks, even the married ones, wouldn't go to war to defend the honor of their in-laws. These are the same hosers that invented mother-in-law jokes.
I had to explain the matter to a coworker today. I felt really fuqyng juiced that I changed his mind. Now we all have a job to do.
By the way, I watched Iron Jawed Angels on Sunday night. It was about the radical suffragist movement in America. It annoyed me that everyone was supposed to be in the Belle Epoque and then the Last Colonial War (oh, sorry... World War One) but the soundtrack was cloyingly modern. However, the visceral effect of the flick was there. Mawkish, preachy, but it has good parts. It relates to what is going on today in this fight.
-Elvis loves you and he can marry you in Vegas... coming soon to Somerville
*: absquatulate: to get up from one squat or place and leave. I learned that one from a weird SAT vocabulary list.
