I spent a long day last week dealing with my mother-in-law’s shit.
No, I mean her actual shit. She’d just gotten out of the hospital, and needed help with – never mind, I’ll spare you the details. I’m generally a squeamish person, and this is a job I wouldn’t do for any amount of money.
Yet I did it – in fact, I took for granted that it was my responsibility to do it. When I got married, I chose to become part of her family, and that brought both joys and obligations. When you commit for better or worse, in sickness and in health, this is part of what you’re taking on, and I don’t regret that.
I’m not married to her son. I’m married to her daughter.
We saw a couple of advances for marriage equality in the past week: Maryland will recognize same-sex marriages from out of state, and it looks like same-sex marriage is finally a go in DC. Which brings out the usual right-wing babbling about the horrors of allowing people to make their own marital decisions.
Most of the arguments against same-sex marriage strike me as tacked-on, a way of creating silly distractions to avoid their real objections. For instance, I don’t think many people are serious about the argument that "It’s not a marriage if it doesn’t make babies." If they were, a lot of heterosexuals would see their marriage licenses revoked in a hurry. Nor are many people stupid enough to think that same-sex marriage would somehow lead to dogs and cats magically becoming able to consent to marriage.
I got a glimpse of the real objections in a cyber-argument with a woman who began sputtering about divorce and out-of-wedlock births. What did this have to do with same-sex marriage? Marriage was being ruined, she insisted, because people respected it less. And somehow, if same-sex couples were allowed to marry, that meant marriage was respected less. Like real estate, if those people could have it, then its value went down.
This made me give some thought to how much I respected marriage.
A few years ago, when my wife’s sister was unable to take care of her daughter, my wife and I welcomed our 14-year-old niece into our home. We stuck it out through some rough patches, and she’s now in her early twenties and still living with us. Neither of us had planned on being a parent, but we took care of her because we’re a family, and that’s what families do.
I respected marriage enough to fight hard to participate in the first place. When Proposition 8 was being debated in 2008, I did phone banking, wrote letters to the editor, donated, marched, and handed out fliers. At times I got flipped off, yelled at, cursed, and treated with contempt. I had to wonder how many of those people were divorced like John McCain, how many were adulterers like Newt Gingrich, how many just plain didn’t love their spouses.
On Election Day 2008, I spent hours in front of a polling place with a "No on 8" sign. Some guy walked by with his dog, loudly talking about how he "wanted to marry his dog," which he apparently thought was a clever and original insult. Would he have endured the same kind of abuse for his spouse? Maybe, maybe not. I put up with his bigoted hatefulness, because my marriage is that important to me.
I woke up the next morning to the sound of sobbing as my wife watched the news. I got up and put my arms around her, and tried to understand how people who didn’t even know us could do her this kind of harm.
We spent months in a legal limbo, finally told that our marriage would be among the 18,000 that remained valid, but no more same-sex couples could marry. Do those 18,000 marriages somehow lessen the millions of heterosexual ones?
I value marriage enough to keep fighting for equality. And when we win – and we will – the institution of marriage will be stronger for having us in it.