Harry’s Freedom Foxhole - Legislating Love
Love is awesome. Love is awesome in the I-feel-like-high-fiving-strangers-and-listening-to-early-Beatles-records sense, but it’s also “awesome” in the old sense, i.e., “inspiring great apprehension or fear.” It can be a terrifying force, sweeping through your life and throwing you around like a plastic bag—all of a sudden you’re ignoring texts from your friends, ducking out of work early, driving on the highway at 3 AM thinking, “This is normal, this is fine. I’ll just call in sick tomorrow, we’ll spend the weekend in Connecticut. It doesn’t really matter if I overdraw my checking account to pay for the hotel.” Love is a hand on your heart that occasionally clenches into your fist. Compared to that, what’s marriage? A ring? A piece of paper that you get so your taxes are easier to fill out?
Everyone agrees that it’s way more than that. To conservatives who try really hard to oppose gay marriage from an intellectual standpoint that doesn’t involve outright gay bashing, marriage is an “institution” (also see “the institution of family”). They’ll usually lump in the rising numbers of single mothers and stuff like vitro fertilization in with gay marriage and get real abstract in their efforts to suggest that the consequences of gay marriage could be disastrous and far-reaching. Conservatives can’t say what those consequences will be, but they’re convinced that ominous stuff is on the horizon once men who already live together and have sex and arguments become able to freely visit one another in the hospital if they get sick.
For gay people, the issue is less abstract. They want to marry because everyone else can marry, and because their minority status is pretty much based around who they love—who they’re capable of loving—the law’s acknowledgement of that love is especially important. It’s one of those issues that seems so obvious to me I can’t even understand why it’s an issue. There are a bunch of people who are discriminated against in a way that’s important (at least symbolically), and you want to keep things as they are because a) some dude in a desert wrote some shit thousands of years ago or b) you have some extremely complex philosophical justifications for objecting to anything ever changing?
I am extremely late for work but I felt that this was important for me to write down. I had trouble getting out of bed this morning and I spent a good hour just laying there feeling sorry for myself. I know my life isn’t going the way I want it to right now but…when I took the bigger picture into mind I came up with:
At least I am not dead.
This year I’ve seen too many people leave this world suddenly and that’s never been a reality I ever had to accept.
So today I am going to focus on appreciating being alive.
