A term increasingly used in reference to the gay rights struggle is "Marriage Equality". It is been adopted by progressives to replace the phrase "Gay Marriage" which is seen too controversial and inflammatory since it actually describes what it means. I mean everybody loves marriage, and everybody loves equality, right? What’s wrong with that?
Lots.
Perhaps the saddest part of the Proposition 8 defeat in California is the fact that the very real and very human struggle of gay couples to maintain their marriages has been completely ignored by both sides. The Yes on 8 crowd talked about activist judges, loss of religious liberties, and indoctrination of children. The No on 8 folks talked about tolerance, fairness, and equality all in vague terms. Both sides avoided showing actual gay couples in their commercials, and the whole dialogue was moved into the realm of empty oratory.
This is where phrases like marriage equality come in, they seek to sanitize the issue by literally removing the gay from gay marriage. The argument being that lots of people don’t like gays, so lets just not mention them when talking about marriage. The problem is that the millions who voted to pass Proposition 8 were not voting against equality, they were voting against gay people. We are not fooling anybody by avoiding the word gay; all it does is keep gay couples out of sight and out of mind.
How much more effective would the anti 8 campaign be if they had the cojones to talk about real gay couples? Here is Bob, and here is his husband Ted. Bob is a dentist, Ted is a chef. Here is their daughter Michelle. Here they are in their house eating dinner. Please don’t take away Bob and Teds marriage. Wouldn’t that be better than the stuff we did see? People here laugh at Joe the Plumber, but Joe was a great PR move. It was an attempt to take Republican tax policy and give it a human face. Where is Joe the married gay guy? Not a celebrity, or a politician but and actual normal gay man to humanize gay marriage.
We need to stop distancing ourselves from our own message and focus on raising the visibility of gay couples. This struggle is not about fairness, or tolerance, or even equality, it is about human love.
It’s OK to say gay marriage.