I Want a Marriage License!

This August Maureen and I will celebrate our 39th anniversary together.  

I want a marriage license!

When we first met, the folks that argued (sometimes quiet loudly in our face) against our relationship even existing, let alone our desire for legal protections and social recognition, based their objections on the falsehood that gay/lesbian people didn’t want to be in life-long relationships.  According to them, we just wanted to sleep around and never settle down to a family life - the backbone of the American society.  They professed they "knew what our kind was" and no real-life proof of who we actually were was ever going to be heard or believed.

But still I wanted a marriage license!

Almost four decades later, the flaming has shifted, but the intensity remains, thanks to the over-eager few.  The most negatively enthusiastic are those who want to impose their personal religious affiliation’s beliefs on my civil rights.  If one argument begins to lose weight with the general public (“Gay marriage will destroy our world”) then another is crowd-tested (“We don’t hate the sinner, just the sin!”). 

And so, still no marriage license for us!

A recent tactic is to say we’re redefining marriage, and that has never happened before (a lie).  Also, marriage is for couples to have children.  Of course, that one doesn’t even begin to hold water since there are lots of opposite-gender couples who choose not to have children; who are not physically able to procreate; who perhaps use alternate methods of procreation available to same-gender couples, and on and on.  My widowed grandmother married Hebbie on her 69^th birthday – a wonderful match.  According to the lame procreation argument, they shouldn’t have been allowed to get married!  

But they got a marriage license, and I still can’t!

What else have we heard?

“Activist judges (any judge that disagrees with their position) shouldn’t decide the constitutionality of marriage laws.  It should be up to the legislature.”

“Legislatures shouldn’t make laws about marriage rights.  It should be up to the voters.”

“Voters shouldn’t have a say in who can get married.  It should be up to my religious organization!”

The rules keep shifting.  And still I can’t get a marriage license!

The most recent rant:  marriage is a religious institution and the government should stay out of it.  By that argument I would have been married in my church years ago!  

Look…I want a marriage license.  A civil marriage license so I and my love, with whom I have lived through good times and bad, through sickness and health, who has stood by me and I by her the way any life-long committed couple does, will have the legal rights and protections afforded by the American federal government and each of the individual 50 States, of these United States.

I don’t want every person in America to love me.  I don’t want every person in America to celebrate and be overjoyed that I am so blessed to have the most wonderful woman in the world love me and want to be married to me.  I don’t want every religious institution in our republic to embrace our love and commitment.

I just want a marriage license!!!