Revolutionary Moderation

So, to the issue itself



It dawned on me this morning that mocking Elsie "Straight-pride Parade" Wayne was entertaining, but what of the actual issue at hand? The federal government is debating allowing gay couples to marry.



The arguments against this seem to be along the lines of "This is never what marriage has meant, and to allow marriage to describe homosexual relationships would degrade the institution" (Please, someone tell me if I'm wrong, if there are deeper, smarter arguments, if I've only set up a straw man here. These are the best I've heard or found, and I've heard far worse.)



I'm thinking the institution has already been sufficiently degrades by people like this. Or this. In fact, I'm wondering why gay couples would want to degrade their relationships by using the same word.



Except that I don't wonder. Two people can have a lot of control over the boundaries of their relationship, whatever the legal status, while both are hale and hearty. But should one die, or become severely ill, the other partner may find themselves watching from the sidelines while biological family members or courts start making decisions. In the case of the widowed not-legally-but-c'mon-let's-be-honest-here-spouse, shared property, pensions, even the home can disappear as blood family squabble over the estate. But worse is the case of the partner of someone severly ill, where access to their loving, dying partner is denied by family members, and decisions the spouse made and shared before the illness are being overturned by potentially well-meaning but less intimate family members. I can't imagine the difficulty of watching a spouse die, but how much harder must it be when your feelings of helplessness are multiplied by a legal and cultural system that denies your role in your partner's life? How galling would it be to sit in a back pew, while a funeral service your partner would have hated never uses the word "gay", never acknowledges who your partner was to the world?



These are the "special rights" that so much of the right-wing goes on about. And they're correct. Having the role your relationship plays in your lives recognized is a very special right indeed, and one that heterosexuals would do well to stop abusing and degrading.