Marriage is Not Abortion

It was one year ago that gay and lesbian American families won the right to legal marriage from sea to shining sea. Not a single blue shard of sky has fallen; not a single heterosexual marriage has collapsed as a result; no jackbooted thugs have kicked in a bachelor's door in the middle of the night, a same-gender spouse-to-be in tow, to "force" marriage equality "down his throat"; and no earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, or meteor storms have leveled cities as proof of the displeasure of a stringently controlling sky-god with anger management issues. (Instead, the only earthquakes Americans have really had to worry about are the ones used by fracking. Hello, evangelicals? Environmentalism, drinkable aquifer water, and true conservation: On the Holy Agenda? Yes? No? Hello? Hallooo??)

None of that has happened. Instead, tens of thousands of couples who were denied legal existence as a family -- their deeply held and rapturous devotion notwithstanding -- were liberated from an onerous second-class status, an emotionally taxing (and financially draining) separate-and-unequal existence that they should not have had to endure in the first place. And even as heterosexuals were not being forced into marriage with someone of the same gender, gays and lesbians were discovering the joy of participating in authentic marriage -- not forced, fake marriage into which they'd been pressured, intimidated, or coerced by church, family, and society at large.

Those coercions still take place, of course, but now -- in the light of marriage equality -- they look like what they are: Brute and bullying power grabs, irrational and cruel exercises not of one's own individual rights but of one's will love the rights of others.

Here's what I recall of the day itself: I was in Istanbul with others from the Boston Gey Men's Chorus, We had just completed the Israel leg of our tour of e middle East, and it was our first day in Turkey. That afternoon was dedicated to a tour of the Hagia Sophia -- a building that has ben both church and mosque during its long existence, and which now is a secular historical monument. WE had to wait outside for a about a quarter of an hour until our group could be admitted. Not too far off, we could see the glorious architecture of the Blue Mosque. The day was gorgeous and sunny. We were all a little tired from the morning's travel.

Then a sudden ripple went through the crowd. My fellow chorus boys were looking a their cell phones and whispering excitedly. Subdued exclamations and pumped fists erupted. Grins broke out. The word spread: The Supreme Court had just ruled that marriage was indeed a right that every American, whether lesbian, gay, or straight, possessed. The day, already remarkable, was transformed -- and so were we. Now were closer than ever to being true first-class citizens of the United States of America. The fact that we'd heard the news just prior to entering an ancient and abiding citadel of faith -- of faiths, actually, plural -- named for "Holy Wisdom" was certainly not lost on us. You never saw a happier group of tourists floating along on a general Cloud Nine than we were that day.

Another transformation: That of Michael Signorine's book "Its Not Over" from optimistic, but slightly chiding, middleweight entry on the LGBT nonfiction shelf to an urgent, must-read, and even "visionary" -- were one to believe the hype -- document that addressed key concerns of the moment. Among other potent, salient observations, Signorile warned that anti-gay Christians -- those of little faith, convinced that gays were going to somehow destroy righteousness -- had, well in advance of the Supreme Court's finding, begun diagramming their bid to rescind marriage rights for same-sex families. They had plans, Signorile said, to "chip away" at marriage equality the same way they have gradually and relentlessly restricted and curtailed access to abortion for women.

The events that happened immediately after the Court's finding seemed to prove Signorine's warnings true. Lawmakers were advocating that the law should to be followed; bills outlining exemptions from non-discrimination ordinances were scribbled up; government officials announced that they had no intention of doing their jobs, and when they were disciplined they were celebrated as martyrs of persecuted Christendom rather than dismissed the way any other employee would have been for not doing the job. (I mean, imagine your local Taco Bell putting up a poster of Chad the Lazytarian for sticking to his guns and refusing to serve more than the 120 burritos allowed in the Scrolls of the Holy Cookbook. "Hungry hordes hurled heated invectives but Chad stood is ground! Let them eat cake!")

Nor were the religious the only homophobes to whom lawmakers were suddenly eager to cater. In some places, anyone with a "moral objection" to gays or a "personal conviction" was now excused from having to take their order, or retain them as a psychiatric patient, or in general have to share the any metaphorical oxygen with them.

Anti-gay hate crimes kept rising, even as picket fences went up around gay and lesbian homes. Pairs of man and women -- excoriated from pulpits and unable and unwilling to form significant long-term relationships -- said their vows and slipped rings onto one anothers' fingers in overt and definite disproof of those calumnies. Suddenly, gays were people, too, and holy-rolling bigots were in a frenzy.

So will Signorile's dire predictions come true? Well, they sort of have already. The "chipping away" at our liberties, freedoms, and fundamental rights has commenced. Of course, the thing is, it never really stopped. Its been going on for centuries. Marriage is another, and quite sturdy, layer of protective varnish over our lives and our loves, but the chisel-wielding vandals who have targeted us all this time -- just for the rush of sadistic pleasure it gives them to stifle, harm, frustrate, and, when they can get away with it, kill us -- well, they have decided to hammer all the harder.

But while that hardcore group of haters may have picked up a cadre of reflexively fearful followers -- because change always kicks up the fearful, at least for a while -- they aren't likely to hold on to them. Even the GOP -- which for over a generation has been reliably anti-LGBT -- is going to have to amend its ways, because too many people know better now.

The thing is, abortion foes may or may not have have been radicalized by an earlier Supreme Court finding -- Roe v. Wade -- but the hardcore anti-marriage bigots were always radicals. (And hardcore is the word for them. If human life consists, as a philosopher once noted, of what a person thinks about all day long, then life for the hardcore haters is nothing less than a full-on nonstop gay orgy... leading to the question of who, exactly, it is that's sexually messed up.) By definition, most people simply are not radicals. They are too busy, too pragmatic, and -- this is key -- too compassionate.

By and large, people are connected to their families and communities. The whole point of coming out has been to demonstrate that we -- gays, the so-called "deviants" -- are one and the same with the families and communities of our heterosexual fellow citizens. While we hid in the closet we made it easy for fear-mongers and people with extravagantly pornographic imaginations to define who we were and what we wanted. Once we began to emerge, however, it became ever more manifestly evident that LGBTs are now, and never were, horn-headed beasts with cloven hooves panting with hot gasps for a chance to wreak sexual mayhem. (That would be the hardcore haters other there.)

One year in, how many former foes of marriage equality have attended the same-sex wedding of a friend, a sibling, a parent, a child, or a co-worker? How many have seen how easily their children accepted two uncles or two grandmothers -- all without being confused and with no trace of any "recruiting" going on? After only one year, how many formerly die-hard homophobes suddenly realize that the mentor who taught them valued job skills, the good Samaritan who helped them fix a tire on the side of a road, the friend from their schooldays who they still think of fondly... all these good people are also gay people, and not only that, but gay people who are marrying gay life partners? How many have woken up to the reality (a Reality that still eludes many in the media, sadly) that there is no "gay marriage" and no "straight marriage?" There's just marriage. Th a's all there needs to be. It applies equally to single-gender and mixed-gender couples.

After more than forty years of legality, abortion still excites wild and irrational passions; it still incites the violent and tips the unhinged into excesses of all sorts, from legislative violence against women to the more traditional physical kinds of harassment and harm. Four decades from now, will Ted marrying Alan still prompt some people to raise an eyebrow, much less a tire iron? With few exceptions, I really doubt it. For one thing abortion isn't a community thing. It doesn't come gussied up with announcements in the newspaper, nor a party at a reception hall, and it doesn't lead to cherish photos in the family album (or the individual iPhone). Our weddings are part of our family histories -- and our spouses are part of our families. No, marriage equality will to be the new abortion, and once the issue stops drawing voters -- and, more to the point, donor dollars -- then most politicians and pastors are going to let the issue drop. (After their constituents and parishioners already have, most likely, but that's the nature of the beast.)

Even when it's necessary -- or, at least, a woman feels it to be necessary -- abortion isn't a happy thing. And maybe that's the crucial difference: Maybe if we heard more stories about abortion from women who had them, we'd be able to dispel the twisted, over-imagined, judgmental preconceptions surrounding the issue, and attached to the women who are affected. As long as we hear silence around the issue from those it most affects -- women in unstable and violent relationships; women trapped in a cycle of poverty; women who have been raped, sometimes systematically -- the high-handed and self-congratulatory belief will persist that woman who get abortions are sluts or sinners or worse. If only the women who actually know could feel empowered to speak up, we could move past abortion toI he root causes -- sexual violence, sexual domination, the unpardonable theft of a person's physical and reproductive autonomy. If we told the truth about the Whys of abortion and then took the appropriate actions, the thing itself would fade away.

It's a shameful thing, a spiteful thing, and it's not right -- but as long as it creates an aura of shame that sends people ducking for cover, abortion will generate its own climate of rejection and contempt.

Meantime, with every handful or thrown rice and every boutonni�re pinned to a bride gown and every crops kerchief tucked into the breast pocket of a groom's wedding day suit jacket, we dispel similar and parallel myths: That we are sluts, that we are sinners, that we are hedonistic wastrels with no ability to love another person. Those lies melt in the June sunshine of our I Dos faster than they ever melted in the happy glow of our Pride parades, because weddings are rooted in our family psychologies. Hard-hearted relatives who didn't "get it" suddenly understand, once you enshrine your partnership in the magical folds of marriage.

Marriage is not abortion. Abortion ends life, and too often it is the resort to which those leading lives already shattered must turn. Marriage? Whether you are straight or gay, marriage is life -- the life in common when two become as one.