"I now pronounce you, orangutan and wife."
Gay marriage has been grabbing headlines again recently, since
courts in Georgia and New York issued a couple of rulings last week. Georgia upheld its DOMA, which defines marriage as being between a man and a woman, while the New York ruled that the state Constitution does not grant same sex couples the right to wed.
Not long after those decisions, someone (probably my brother in law) sent me a link to an editorial (which now, of course, I can't find) on the subject. The article led off with several quotes from politicians and religious leaders, about the horrible things that would befall the institution of marriage and civilization in general if these couples were allowed to wed. The twist, revealed later in the piece, was that the quotes dated back to the 1960s and referred not to gay marriage but interracial marriage, which was still illegal in several southern states until the Supreme Court struck down their laws in the late 1960s.
The obvious point the author was trying to make was that gay couples wedding would no more erode the concept of marriage than allowing interracial couples did. By drawing parallels to the hateful speech being used today by those who would defend and define marriage as between a man and a woman, the author expressed his hope that someday such rhetoric would sound just as ridiculous when applied to gay marriage as it does about interracial couples.
It only occurred to me later that in a way, articles like that editorial make a compelling case for the opposite argument as well. How easy would it be for someone who spoke out in 1966 about the harmful precedent the legalization of interracial marriage would set, to look at the gay marriage debate in 2006 and say 'I told you so.' "See, if'n you let a woman marry a nigra, pretty soon she'll wanna marry a nigra woman, and then she'll start eyein' the nigra woman's dog..." Of course, you'll never see any mainstream religious organization take credit for their prescience, so maybe it's time for proponents of gay marriage to remind everyone on their behalf. It's one thing to point out that the same things are being said today, but it's another thing entirely to point out that
it's the same people saying them.
