DOMA and Prop 8 Unconstitutional

When you wake up in the morning (hey, it was still morning) and your in-box is full of joyful announcements that the Defense of Marriage Act and California's Proposition 8 [both PDF links] have both been declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, that's a damn fine way to start a day.

My usual demeanor is pretty cynical, I'll be the first to admit -- the things people do to one another, around the world and particularly here in the US, have contributed to that throughout my life. One of the most ridiculous, hateful, fearmongering trends in recent years has been the insistence by so many social conservatives that same-sex marriage is bad, wrong, evil, unnatural, and a threat to "traditional" marriage. The people who support this vile drivel have been masking their hate and fear and general negativity about the issue by insisting that they're trying to "defend" marriage. Even with many thousands of gay and lesbian people getting married in the US in states where it's been legal, even with the hundreds of thousands (maybe millions?) of gay and lesbian people getting married in countries around the world where it's legal -- including Canada, right next door -- fearful, scowling folks keep insisting that gay marriage is somehow dangerous, that it threatens traditional man-woman marriage.

You know what? My traditional marriage doesn't need defending, certainly not by people like them. When Jim and I were living in California, about 40,000 gay couples got married during the five months that it was legal, if I remember the numbers correctly, and hey, we're still married! Imagine that! All those people, men marrying men and women marrying women, and there was never a morning when either Jim or I woke up and said, "Hey, damn, I feel this overwhelming need to divorce you and marry someone of my own sex!" We have a great marriage, it's as strong as ever, and all those gay people joyfully marrying each other did nothing whatsoever to damage our marriage. Heck, we got a double dose of this dangerous threat to our union when our new home state of Washington legalized gay marriage last year -- you'll be happy to know I've still felt no impulse to divorce my husband.

One of my favorite sayings to come out of this situation is, "The only threat to traditional marriage is traditional divorce." Halle-freaking-luiah.

If you want to defend the institution of marriage, how about taking all the money and energy and other resources that've been poured into trying to prevent gays and lesbians from marrying and instead use it to, I don't know, offer free counseling to couples whose marriages are actually in trouble? That'd be a constructive focus for the beliefs of the social conservatives, one that'd help a lot of people while hurting nobody, unlike DOMA and Prop 8 and related efforts, which are purely destructive and have caused a lot of hardship and misery.

Just a suggestion for any defenders of marriage who are trying to figure out what their next move should be.

So, the Feds now recognize any legal marriage, no matter what the plumbing of the married people looks like. And gay people are free to marry once more in California, which is awesome.

This news actually chips away a tiny bit at my natural cynicism. If the other 37 states ever get with the 21st century and let gay couples marry, I might actually turn into a complete optimist! Let's work toward that, shall we?

Angie