I keep hearing about the slippery slope we’re all supposedly on because of the Supreme Court’s ruling allowing gay marriage.
Critics of the ruling were in full blather Friday: Gay marriage was taking over; traditional nuptials binding one groom and one bride were kaput; government goons would force preachers to marry Adam and Steve. What’s next?
I started worrying because, well, I’m not ready to get gay married. I don’t own a skinny-cut tux or a rainbow cumberbund, and I still have a bit of a hard time watching two men kiss.
Then I studied the issue. It turns out I don't have to get gay married after all. The court ruling affected other people, not me. All of us folks entwined in conventional, hetero marriages can remain blissfully attached.
Whew!
I had seen that polls increasingly indicated Americans were warming to the prospect of liberty and marriage for all. According to Gallup, 60 percent of Americans surveyed this year said “I do” when asked if they support gay marriage.
Even so, some still argue the Gay Agenda is subverting all that Americans hold dear. They might be right, but Americans don’t seem too exercised about it.
The night before the court’s ruling was announced, 23-year-old Sean Conroy of the Sonoma Stompers was the first openly gay man to play in a professional baseball game. The story barely registered. There was no hoopla, just a few teammates sporting rainbow socks to support their starting pitcher.
OK, it was only in something called the Pacific Association of Baseball Clubs. But here was a gay incursion into the National Pastime, and the next day the republic still stood.
All this is a huge shift from not too long ago. In 2004, just 37 percent of Americans supported gay marriage. And in 1996, only 27 percent did.
We Georgians are more evenly split, with 47 percent saying no and 44 percent yes, according to a recent poll from the Public Religion Research Institute.
I can’t remember when I moved to the “no skin off my nose” camp. I remember arguing with a colleague back in the 1990s against businesses providing domestic partner benefits for gay couples. When my co-worker tried to pin me down as to why, I couldn’t come up with a reason, other than it might cost me more as a customer and because non-married people might pretend to be partners to scam themselves some free health insurance.
“But if gay couples could get married, then that would be a non-issue,” she said.
Married? Hmmm. The whole idea seemed odd then. I suppose I’d have been one of the 27 percent in the Gallup poll.
Not long after that, something happened that probably has done more than anything else to move the meter in America on the issue — I learned that someone in my family was, as Seinfeld put it, “on the other team.”
My kid sister moved down here from Chicago after graduating and started going out with someone. I’d had my suspicions, but I was initially anxious when they were confirmed. I was not aghast at the idea. No, I was worried what the family would think. And that it happened on my watch.
Years later, my sister and her partner, after having lived together in two cities and having bought two houses together, decided they would have a baby. My sister dreaded telling my mother.
Mom is a devout Catholic from Ireland and, even though she loved my sister and her partner, well, my sister worried — no, was terrified — that my parents might react violently and do something rash, like disown her.
Imagine having that simmer in your head. Think about how such thoughts tear people up, how the fear twists their inner beings. I never had such concerns; it wasn’t my deal. Until it was.
I was thinking of this when I read Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion that said: “Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.”
When my sister finally broke the baby news, we were all sitting at my kitchen table. My mother was surprised (to say the least) upon seeing a photo of an ultrasound of what would be the first of her two granddaughters and my goddaughter.
To my mother’s credit, and all our relief, she was very accepting of the whole situation. Then when my sister left, my mother turned to me, still a bit shocked, and said, “I never knew she was gay.” And then I realized life is easier when you are situationally oblivious.
Today my sister has two girls, both baptized, and the older one just made her First Communion. But my sister can’t get married in the Catholic Church. Two thousand-year-old institutions don’t move with such speed.
I talked with my sister Friday and was surprised to find she was largely ambivalent about getting married.
“We’ve been together 20 years, why waste a bunch of money for a ceremony?” said the one family member more frugal than me. Her accountant did tell her it would be a smart thing to do tax-wise.
(A DeKalb County judge a few years ago did perform a “second parent” adoption that gave her partner parental rights. Not all judges in the circuit do that, and their lawyer timed it so that judge was in the rotation when they filed their motion.)
She’s happy about Friday’s ruling. “The churches aren’t going to go for it — and I get that, although it doesn’t seem Christian. You can’t get married in any official denomination, only offshoots. But as long as they go for civil marriage … ”
Well, civil ceremonies are better than nothing. Largely, though, she just wants the controversy to subside.
“I want there to be no controversy,” she said. “I just want to live my life and not have to fight for equal rights. I just want to fit into society for who I am. My marriage won’t cause anyone else’s marriage to fail.
“My siblings had the right to be married, I’m happy to finally have the right to do so as well.”
Oh, and as to that gay baseball player on the West Coast, the one who quietly broke a barrier with barely a media blip:
He pitched a three-hit shutout.
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