“If two stand shoulder to shoulder against the gods, / Happy together, the gods themselves are helpless / Against them while they stand so.” - Maxwell Anderson
Once upon a time, my home state had a one-drop rule.
A single documented black ancestor – “one drop” of black blood – defined you as non-white. The actual color of your skin was irrelevant. Whether or not a comb would pass freely through your hair (another test, used later to sort people into races) didn’t matter. If a single great-grandfather or great-grandmother was black, so were you.
There is a moment in the musical Show Boat, when a white man and his mixed-race wife are confronted by a sheriff out to charge the husband with miscegenation. The man pricks his wife’s finger, swallows a few drops of her blood, and evades arrest because he is no longer “white”, and thus their marriage is no longer a crime.
I always thought that was a sweet story – something beautiful in the midst of horror, a blossom on a battlefield. But as I think of it, and think of the Civil Rights struggle of our time, it reminds me of something important – the critics are right: gay marriages are not equal.
Read on . . .
“Patience and perseverance have a magical effect before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish.” - John Quincy Adams
In Davenport, Iowa, Vivian Boyack and Alice "Nonie" Dubes have finally gotten married. Now both in their 90’s, the women have been together some 72 years. Their relationship was old enough to collect Social Security by the time their state began allowing gay marriages in 2009, as was the teenager they once hired to do yard work.
There are many of these stories now, more every day. This summer, NBA referee Violet Palmer finally married her partner of 20 years. Houston mayor Annise Parker married her partner of 23 years in January (albeit the couple had to travel to California to do it). Actress Lily Tomlin and her partner Jane Wagner were together 42 years before they were able to marry in 2013. And of course, Edie Windsor and Thea Spyer were together some 40 years before they could be married in Ontario in 2007 – a marriage sadly not recognized by their own country until after Spyer’s death.
Boyack and Dubes, the Nonagenarian Newlyweds, may be the new record holders, but there is no shortage of couples who’ve persevered through decades while waiting for society to treat them as valid.
“It is not marriage that fails; it is people that fail. All that marriage does is to show people up.” - Harry Emerson Fosdick
And in the way of contrast . . .
In May 2011, Kim Kardashian married Kris Humphries in a grandiose television spectacle, which included a two-part run-up to matrimony special and a signature perfume line. The marriage lasted 72 days and collapsed in a popcorn-munching sideshow of ridicule and recrimination. Elvis-phile Nic Cage spent only four months married to the King’s daughter Lisa Marie. The ghastly union of Carmen Electra and Dennis Rodman limped along for 9 days of marital bliss – but another Dennis (Hopper), beat that record with an eight-day marriage to Michelle Phillips in 1970. Still, the winner is Britney Spears, with her Lost Weekend of a marriage to a childhood friend, which clocked in at 55 hours.
OK, these are celebrity marriages, and we all know celebrity marriages come and go. But it’s not just them. Something like 40-50% of first marriages ends in divorce in America. The average length of those marriages is around 8 years, but many are, of course, substantially shorter. I’ve known a few people personally who couldn’t make it to the paper anniversary, and some of them failed more than once. There are also estimated to be something like 60,000 annulments each year in America, marriages so brief and broken it’s easier for everyone to just pretend they didn’t happen.
“Many a man's reputation would not know his character if they met on the street.” - Elbert Hubbard
Nevada – the nation’s leader in impulse weddings – also leads the nation in the rate of divorce, not surprisingly. But red states Oklahoma, Arkansas, Arizona, Wyoming, and Idaho come right behind. The Bible Belt has the highest rate of divorce at the regional level. Republicans, despite their family-values image, divorce at a higher rate (and frequency) than Democrats.
Conservative icon Rush Limbaugh has been married three times, all of which ended in divorce and the shortest of which ran only three years. Newt Gingrich is on his third marriage - two of them to women with whom he violated an earlier marriage. Rudy Giuliani famously cheated on his second wife, Donna Hanover, with two-time divorcee Judith Nathan, culminating with a horrific public separation and divorce that mercifully ended in 2002.
Republican politicians Mark Souder, John Ensign, David Vitter, Mark Sanford and Chip Pickering (among others) have all been shamed by affairs – all with a curious level of acceptance from their pro-family party. There is an awfully short list of politicians who’ve voted against allowing marriages like that of Boyack and Dubes who are, themselves, still married to their first spouse.
“There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.” - Iris Murdoch
So yeah, gay and straight marriages are not equal. Straight marriage can indeed be taken for granted. There’s usually no struggle for it. Often the worst thing a straight couple might face is disapproval from potential in-laws. Unlike the mixed couple in
Show Boat, or the uncounted gay couples who’ve endured decades in sometimes-secret loves, straight marriage carries little danger, at least from outside. It has no mountains to climb, no oceans to cross. It’s actually rewarded, through tax codes and countless legal and social benefits.
That’s allowed it to become, in some cases, trivial. There have been TV shows based around the naked ambition (sometimes literally) of trying to marry a supposed millionaire or prince. The whole institution is a running punch line through much of reality TV. Among a certain class of vapid celebrity, marriage is little more than a traditional third date, and that most sacred of sacraments can be performed in a drive-thru chapel by an Asian juggler dressed as Elvis, while his bored wife stands by as Official Witness while trying to beat level 323 on Candy Crush.
“Our mettle is tested by storms, not by calm.” - Jonathan Lockwood Huie
So while there are hetero couples as devoted to each other as Boyack and Dubes, there are others, many others, pulled in by the cultural fantasies of the ceremony, the perks of the legal status and the petting-zoo safety which open hetero relationships enjoy. Where marriage is easy, it’s easily disposable. It’s harder to value something that took no effort to achieve, than it is to value something hard won through blood and tears. We all wave flags on the Fourth of July, but that guy down the block with the funny last name, the one who crawled under barbed wire in Eastern Europe to escape to this country, might take it a bit more seriously than a lot of people.
Every gay couple that’s waited five or ten or twenty years – and in some cases, more than three times that long – for marriage to become an option for them has endured hell. They’ve gone through hatreds and injustices piled up like Autumn leaves that come again year after year. They’ve lived a shared life helping each other up a steep and treacherous hill, with every day a prize won by perseverance and faith and love in the face of brutal opposition.
The glitzy chapels of the Vegas strip, and the drunken couples that stumble out of them to cap off a fun weekend, can’t hold a candle to that. The trainwreck reality shows parading the “Real X of X” ad nauseum don’t compare. And the serial marriage and satyr-like infidelity of gay marriage’s biggest opponents are a sham and an insult compared to the loyalty of two women who spent seven decades in a bond that earned them countless insults and injuries, and gave them nothing but each other in return.
“Wasn't marriage, like life, unstimulating and unprofitable and somewhat empty when too well ordered and protected and guarded. Wasn't it finer, more splendid, more nourishing, when it was, like life itself, a mixture of the sordid and the magnificent; of mud and stars; of earth and flowers; of love and hate and laughter and tears and ugliness and beauty and hurt.” - Edna Ferber, Show Boat, 1926
Not all hetero marriages are broken. Not all are trivial. Half end in divorce, but half don’t. There is a core of good, solid, devoted marriages buried under the mountain of failure and flippancy. Some of these are couples that have, indeed, gone through struggles – albeit not ones imposed by society and law, at least in most cases. Many of them are simply the products of the devotion and commitment that come when you find the right person, the one you can’t live without – whether fate ever truly tests your bond or not.
Not all divorces are bad, and, of course, they’re not all hetero. Many gay couples have already divorced, including a few celebrated as pioneers when marriage certificates first started being issued. Couples – gay and straight – can divorce for both good reasons and bad, for need and for want. No marriage is perfect, and none endures without its stumbles.
But there is an idea on the side of the opposition – that straight marriages are inherently good and sacred and just better – which is dismissed by the cavalcade of shallow, brief and utterly devalued unions in quickie chapels and TV shows and our own social circles. And there is a powerful counterargument in the longsuffering fidelity of women like Vivian Boyack and Nonie Dubes and all the other couples – gay or mixed-race or challenged by whatever social stigmas or political hurdles – who've shown that what makes a real marriage is not some cosmetic thing that can be regulated, but something primal and dauntless and beyond whatever chains man can forge to control it.
For gay and straight marriage to be truly equal, a lot of us straight people would have to have to learn that lesson, as well.