Is it that there is only a finite amount of some mysterious substance called “marriage,” that if too many gay people use it up, there won’t be enough left over for all the straight people who want to be married? Is it that God’s blessing will only shine down on heterosexuals in proportion to the number of gay people who are made to feel that His curses and damnation rain down upon them? What is it about gays being Married, and I mean Married Proper and not just “Civilly Unioned,” that somehow automatically invalidates heterosexual marriage? Is the state of being married so miserable that the only validation you heterosexuals feel in it is being able to exclude others from it? How does my love for my same-sex honey-pie make your love for your opposite-sex sweetie-pooks somehow less than? Please explain it to me like you would to a child, or a Martian, or a clueless homosexual who simply does not understand, because I don’t, and if I did, maybe I could cut you some slack on this marriage thing, because I certainly don’t want to take anything away from you, especially something so precious as marriage. Since no one has yet explained it to me – never, not once have I ever heard it explained, only vehemently asserted as if the assertion itself is the only explanation one will ever need – I will venture a couple of guesses, though if these are the only explanations currently available, I need a better one. Maybe, after reading this essay, at least one of you heterosexuals out there who is an expert on marriage can give me one.

One of the better arguments I’ve heard is that the institution of marriage primarily exists for the purpose of raising children, and thus people who have children are entitled to marriage while those who cannot possibly have children are not. Of course, if this were the sole or even primary purpose for marriage, it seems to me that the marriage certificate is generally issued at the wrong time. Instead of being issued at the time a couple appears before a minister or justice of the peace to say “I do,” the marriage certificate should be withheld until such time as a birth or adoption certificate is provided to the appropriate authorities. But if you’re determined to exclude gay people from the institution of marriage on these grounds, it wouldn’t work. Many gay men and lesbians of course have children: in some cases conceived through artificial insemination; but more often through the all too conventional routes of former marriage or adoption. Thus, tying marriage to children and child rearing would almost certainly guarantee gays and lesbians the right to marry.

Some might argue that the legal benefits of marriage are intended to encourage couples to have children, and that we are therefore obliged to extend marital rights only to those who would make good parents, and to withhold marital rights from those who would naturally be bad parents. Of course no one wants to be so crude as to assert that even the very worst heterosexual parents would be better than the very best homosexual parents, so I’ll say it for you. That would be the only conceivable reason for excluding gay couples as a class from the institution of marriage, rather than requiring candidates for marriage to take some kind of a test that would prove them to be suitable parents. Of course, you would have to prove wrong the very many studies of children raised by gay or lesbian couples, showing that they turned out just fine, and that the only ill effects they suffered apart from the ordinary stresses of any type of family life were the result of social prejudice against gay families. Even if you could prove it, it seems a dubious public policy to deny the benefits of marriage to the children of same-sex couples based on an argument that children are disadvantaged under this circumstance. This would be like denying marriage to poor people because poverty has a negative effect on children, or denying marriage to interracial couples because their children might face social discrimination.

In fact, those of us who have studied the history of marriage know that childrearing is not and never has been the primary purpose of marriage. From ancient times marriage has primarily been about property and who gets to inherit it, which is one of the reasons gay people started clamoring for marriage in the first place. There’s nothing more appalling than when a man dies and the family that disowned him thirty years ago and has despised him for all of those thirty years swoops in and claims all of his property, while the man who has loved him for the past thirty-one years gets nothing. That’s the bottom line, to say nothing of the supreme affront of granting same heterosexual family who never visits him in the hospital while he’s dying the right to visit him in the hospital, while the one man who wants to visit him in the hospital can’t because he’s “not family.” For those who think Civil Unions are all gays and lesbians need, that compromise would at least solve those two problems, thank you very much. And all those cold, hard, unromantic types out there who agree that marriage is and always was primarily a property arrangement will probably shrug their shoulders and say that Civil Unions are essentially Marriage as far as 99% of the law is concerned, so once we get this Civil Union thing legalized and out of the way, let’s move on to the next topic please. But that still begs my question of why Marriage Proper is so galling even to the very many decent heterosexual people out there who support the idea of Civil Unions (like Howard Dean, the late Paul Wellstone, and Dick Gephardt, proud dad of a lesbian activist and also proud opponent of gay marriage).

Another function for marriage besides childrearing and property has to do with sex, and this might start to get to the heart of the matter. In our society marriage has by tradition been seen as the only appropriate, socially acceptable outlet for sexual behavior. There are, I think, some good reasons for this. For one thing, sex without boundaries has this tendency to disrupt social relationships. We see this at work, where an office affair can mess up proper working relationships. We see this at home, where extramarital relations can destroy a family and where incest can mar a child’s psyche. We see this at church, where abusive or inappropriate sexual behavior by a minister can destroy faith and send an entire community into upheaval. We also know the toll that unbridled sex can take on society in the form of rampant sexually transmitted diseases. When St. Paul said “it is better to marry than to burn,” this was nothing less than an acknowledgment of the power of sex to destroy and the importance of channeling sex into a format that has clearly recognized and accepted limits. If we deny sex completely, it will destroy us; but if we channel it into acceptable limits, it can become the glue that binds our society together.

But all this sounds like the strongest possible reason to encourage gay people to marry, and as quickly as we can. The AIDS epidemic should have become the rallying cry for legalized gay marriage. Except that marriage is a formal way of saying that society now gives its blessing to the sexual behavior engaged in by the people being married. So is that why you heterosexuals hate the idea of gay marriage so much? Because it turns your stomach to think that we’re doing it? Well, I’ve got news for you: what you do in the bedroom doesn’t exactly make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside either. But I’d never use it as an excuse to deny you the right to do it. I tried to figure out why, after the Supreme Court struck down sodomy laws as unconstitutional in Lawrence v. Texas, polls showed that popular support for the idea of gay marriage actually dropped. It made no sense. If support for gay marriage had reached an all time high, wouldn’t people welcome the end of sodomy laws – those antiquated relics of the old Puritan days when people thought government officials nosing around in our bedrooms was a good thing? This seems proof, if any was needed, that it’s just human nature not to feel entirely good about oneself unless you can keep somebody else down. And the way most heterosexuals apparently feel good about themselves right now, in times of crumbling economies, crumbling values, and wars on terror, is to label themselves as godly and us homos as sinners. Apparently a good number of heteros won’t feel good about themselves until they’ve been able to stamp their superiority over us into the constitution. “Defense of Marriage.”

Some of you are undoubtedly hotly protesting at this point. “I'm not a bigot!” you're saying. “I don't want to keep anyone down. I have nothing personal against homosexuals. It's a question of values! Of preserving the culture! If it were up to me personally, I'd let you have your gay marriage and be done with it, but I can't throw away the Bible!” But no one's asking you to throw away your Bible, only set aside your interpretation of it in matters which concern the law. Marriage as a civil institution conferring rights, responsibilities and respect cannot be owned by particular religious perspectives. Many churches, representing the majority of Christians in America by the way, reject divorce as sin, and remarriage after divorce as a double sin. But they have accepted a state-drawn line which says that if you don't believe in divorce, don't have one. And in case you've forgotten why the founding fathers separated church and state, let's have a little history lesson about Puritans and witch-hangings, the persecutions of Quakers and Baptists, about religious wars and religious tyranny.

By the way, there are churches for whom the conservative Christian argument against homosexuality has no more merit than the biblical justification for slavery. All of us bristle at being called bigots, but if we aren't willing to rationally examine why we cling to certain biblical interpretations while we jettison others (slavery has much more support in the Bible than the condemnation of homosexuality), then we can't claim to rise above the level of certain Americans who just thought they were defending “the culture” when they jailed people who broke segregation laws. Or those who still want to jail people because of who they sleep with.

I’ve sometimes asked myself if it was really worth the fight. If gay marriage was really going to piss off so many straight people, why not just settle for “Civil Unions”? It’s a decent compromise. It will provide more protection for our families than we currently have. It’s better than nothing.

But I realized that marriage is about more than children, more than property, more than sex and sin. It is about humanity. Marriage as an institution forms an integral part of our social fabric. Marriage as a public ritual humanizes us. It marks us not only as partners in individual relationships, but as members of civil society and the whole human family. This is almost certainly why slaves back in the old gone-with-the-wind days were denied the right to marry: because to acknowledge that slaves could have families was to deny their role as chattel. No, we shouldn’t settle for Civil Unions, and straight people out there who love us, who really claim us as family and equals (do you hear me, Dick?), shouldn’t settle for it either. Our relationships are human relationships.