This week the National Organization for Marriage celebrated when the New York Senate defeated the bill that would have legalized same-sex marriage there. “Praise God!” the NOM folks exulted in an e-mail to supporters. They were ecstatic that they had managed to defeat this horrible threat to the sanctity of marriage in New York, and they urged their supporters to keep sending that money so they could move on to New Jersey and stop the threat of gay marriage there.
It made me so mad I wanted to “break plates and strangle ducks,” to borrow a line from Ellsworth Schave’s play “A Texas Romance.”
And why did it make me so mad, you may ask. I’ll tell you. It made me mad because I am sick and tired of hearing people talk about how my loving, committed, monogamous relationship with my wife will somehow taint straight people’s marriages and even destroy the “sacred institution” of marriage itself.
And then today, I got an e-mail with this subject line: “Hook up with lonely Wives for affairs?.” No joke. This e-mail was urging me to “join free right now” so that I could “date lonely cheating wives” and “search for sexy married personals of cheating women who wish to date in your area.” It proudly proclaimed this as “a new website that caters to lonely cheating women who find relationships outside their marriage.”
First of all, let me say, I do not visit online dating sites. I am happily married and have no need of finding a date. Secondly, This isn’t a Web site that caters to lesbians; I checked to make sure. There is a line that specifically says: “Meet lonely wives seeking affection online from men tonight!” And thirdly, I am pretty sure that this site makes money; it wouldn’t have been created if it didn’t.
And yet, it’s my relationship — my loving, committed, monogamous relationship — with my same-sex partner that is destroying the sacred institution of marriage? Give me a freakin’ break!
Just a warning, you’d better hide the plates and the ducks, because I am still mad. And getting madder by the minute.
8 Comments
god! you’re making me mad just from this posting. an angry lesbian is a dangerous lesbian. watch out NOM!!!!
Maybe the reason all these housewives are cheating is because their husbands are all getting gay married.
The problem is, you’re not pointing out the ridiculousness of the idea of the sanctity of marriage, you’re pointing out the ridiculousness of certain people who are married. They’re two different things.
What’s ridiculous to me, Geena, is the idea that gay marriage can have any affect on the sanctity of someone else’s marriage. I don’t think marriage is ridiculous. I don’t think that the idea of marriage being sacred is ridiculous. My marriage is the most sacred thing in my life.
But my marriage is sacred because my wife and I choose to make it so. Whatever might happen in someone else’s marriage cannot take away from that; whether or not some other couple — gay or straight — has the right to get legally married cannot take away from the sanctity of my marriage. Even the fact that the state of Texas does not legally recognize my marriage cannot diminish its sanctity.
Marriage as an institution is not sacred. It never has been. It is only a specific marriage between two individuals can be sacred, and only if those two individuals choose to make their marriage sacred.
Gay marriage must be stopped at all costs, because, you see, homosexual relationships do not last. At least that’s part of the argument against gay marriage. However, with a divorce rate that exceeds 50%, apparently most heterosexual relationships don’t last either. Heaven forbid these zealots allow “our kind” to prove them wrong.
The divorce rate among gays and lesbians who have married is around 5 percent. So I guess that means we should stop opposite sex marriage because it’s destroying the sanctity of same-sex marriage.
I feel like strangling a dummy that looks like a ny senator right now. Its been shown time and time again that there is no good reason to deny the equality in legal marriage of a couple in a consenting, and responsible relationship. They are being very bigoted or they are terribly misinformed. Its a shame after all the history of bigotry we have in this country to learn from and see that acting in this way is not the way to go, from womens rights, to racial rights it still takes us this long to recognize and overcome bigotry. Canada is more free than us right now on this issue. When we are supposed to be the land of the free.
Maybe the reason all these housewives are cheating is because their husbands are all getting gay married.