“There is Room Enough at the Marriage Table for All of Us"

“There is Room Enough at the Marriage Table for All of Us"

by "Bud" E. Lewis Evans

If marriage means "to honor and to hold ... for richer or poorer ... in sickness and in health ... till death do us part " - then my partner-in-life and I are marrieed, and no one on Earth can change that fact. For nearly thirty years we have endured good times and bad times together; we have shared, in equal parts, our sadness and our joyfulness; we have celebrated good health and nursed each other in poor health. By all reasoned virtue -- due to the mutual commitment and love we have for one another, which defines the ideal in any marriage -- we are, in every way, married.

But, alas, we are not recognized as such in law. And now there are fearful, and yes, even spiteful, people who desire to make that a permanent condition of alienation; to make us legal strangers to one another in our own country of birth; pushed forever outside of the very laws which protect other loving couple in America.

The U. S. Constitution is an enduring legal instrument which has been altered only on rare occasions, and then primarily to expand citizens' rights; certainly not rewritten or amended to limited American citizen's rights. Under a constitutional republic we are not obligated to conform, or even give deference, to the questionable moral dictum of another citizen's particular religious beliefs. We are only required to bend to secular law, with the right to redress if laws are not administered fairly and impartially.

The proposed constitutional "Marriage Amendment" would eliminate that right to redress. It is un-American at its very core, and its proponents are rushing to push it through fully knowing that when the typically reactionary American public comes to its senses it will see that this great threat to the "traditional" American family of the early 21st century was very much exaggerated.

The truth of the matter is that the only American families which are threatened by this hysteria are the millions of disenfranchised same-sex families which are constantly under attack. What future generations will pay the price for this threat to federalism which would constitutionally assign to the U.S. central government powers traditionally reserved by the states?

The last debacle of this kind was the ill-conceived Volstead Act, resulting in the 18th Amendment to the US Constitution in 1919, which imposed prohibition nationwide mainly due to the disproportionate political influence

of the self-styled "moralists" of the time. But people still drank alcohol, they just did it illegally.

The effect of prohibition was simply to make a mockery of personal freedoms and to provoke wide-spread disrespect for the law. That mistake resulted in fourteen years of the federal government intruding into people's private lives and social habits with heavy-handed liquor raids on clubs and "speak-easies" with the effect of only driving more and more law-abiding citizens into the more-than-accommodating clutches of organized crime. This, one of the most divisive and wrong-headed acts of the early twentieth century, was finally overturned with the passage of the 21st Amendment in 1933.

Do we now want enshrined a new era of prohibition in the U. S. Constitution; one that mandates Gay and Lesbian Americans are to be forever exempt from equal treatment under the law? Is apartheid to be proscribed by a hetero-centric constitutional amendment which codifies marriage as a "heterosexuals only" legal contract and then robs millions of same-sex couples, in life-long committed relationships, of their hopes and dreams as well as denying them basic legal protections and recognition of their relationships? Do countless numbers of same-sex couples have to flee to Canada, or to some other progressive democracy, in order to avoid constitutionally mandated oppression in their home country, the United States of America? What kind of stabilizing force in society is that which legally disadvantages the millions who exist in one type of family so that another, more common form of family can retain its purely symbolic supremacy at the expense of the other? Is that the legacy this country is going to leave to her children - her multi-racial, multi-cultural, and affectionally diverse children?

Increasingly, it seems that we not learned the lessons of social destruction from biased and the self-styled, wrong-headed "moralists" who once divided this great nation. We can only hope that people of goodwill may recall the painful lessons of our reactionary past before we repeat those very same mistakes at the expense of millions of fellow Americans present today. We trust that fair-minded people will not support this blatantly biased and bigoted attempt to circumvent the U.S. Constitution's guarantees of equal treatment under the law.

Robbing one group of their rights in this nation is an unconscionable act made even more reprehensible when

it is motivated by preserving the status quo of a larger group whose own civil rights are by no means limited by the expansion of those very same rights to all Americans. In this case, it is American same-sex couples in intimate, loving and mutually supportive monogamous relationships who are in jeopardy of being forever consigned to second class citizenship; relegated to a lower caste; perpetually stigmatized as being less than fully American, and less than fully human.

     Today, law-abiding same-sex oriented Americans are accorded fewer relationship rights than convicted mass murders and unrepentant child-rapists who can join in legally recognized heterosexual marriages, and who are often entitled to conjugal rights as well during their incarceration in prison. There is something very, very wrong and morally unjustifiable about this kind of inequity.

      As to the "sky is falling" Chicken Little crowd out there, this isn't about opening the floodgates to "whatever goes". No, same-sex civil marriage does not open the proverbial Pandora's Box and confer the same right to marry one's sister or one's poodle or to have two or three sets of spouses. If anyone could justify such an arrangement let them then petition the courts with both law and reason as to why it should be so. I would say that "herring" is very red indeed and not worthy of rational discourse - hyperbole being now the last refuge of the scoundrel.

     Same-sex oriented Americans have for decades fought hard for recognition of their birth-right of equality.

Ours is not a racial distinction, ours difference lies in the shading of our hearts. It is an emotional attribute that

is just as innate and clings just as close to us as skin color does to others. What could be more natural than romantic

attraction, followed by idealistically mapping out a future together with the object of one's affection? What could be more intrinsic than the need for life-long companionship with those of our own kind? Nothing in Heaven nor on Earth can be more rewarding or more enduring than true love. Nothing.

Yes, contrary to the presuppositions of inculcated hate and politically whipped-up hysteria, there really is room enough at the marriage table for everyone. And not just an apartheid-like system of separate tables (i.e. Civil Unions, Domestic Partnerships, etc.) but room at the same table of marriage for each of us who wish to take on all the responsibility which it demands, as well as reap its rewards. As tempestuous as marriage sometimes is, it most often provides for couples pledged to one another for life, be they heterosexual or same-sex couples, the only real promise of a safe harbor in which to lay anchor and to protect their most precious cargo -- each other.