Here We Go Again

Honestly, I pass up many opportunities to vent my politics on this blog.  I have written many an eloquent post, only to bite my virtual tongue in an attempt to keep this about our little family and the pure cuteness of our Asa-Bean.

But there are times when the two really do overlap.

This week began a federal trial in San Francisco to overturn Prop 8, the California ballot initiative that recently revoked the rights of gay men and lesbians to marry in that state (and which, incidentally, created the incredibly unstable state in which approximately 36,000 gays and lesbians remain legally married, simply because of good timing).  But what is really on trial here is the idea of families like ours.  Marriage, according to the anti-gay-marriage camp, is fundamentally about procreation.  Ummm... okay... we got married, we procreated.  Not "naturally", you say?  Ask M. if her pregnancy felt natural.  I didn't contribute genetic material?  Yep, true - me and so many straight parents.

How can marriage and reproduction be fundamentally linked when there is no fertility test required for marriage?  Should straight, adoptive families not have been allowed to marry?  After all, M. and I could adopt.  Should straight people with fertility issues be denied access to marriage?  Straight friends of ours had such an issue - the husband had had cancer as a child, so they used a donor.  (Sound familiar, anyone?)  No one questions their right to be a family.  No one calls their marriage into question because he didn't contribute genetic material to their two beautiful children.

There are so many levels on which this argument makes no sense, but it succeeds because of the imagery around it - the implied consequences.  Gay couples can't procreate (explicitly stated, if untrue), therefore they're going after your children! (implicitly understood).  Some of the most provocative ads of the Prop 8 campaign - and the ones that generated the most response - were images of children coming home from school and announcing to their parents that it was okay for princes to marry princes, and princesses to marry princesses.  Oh Horror!  In the telling of one simply fairy story, the Gays have corrupted an entire classroom!

May I humbly suggest that if fairy stories were that influential, we'd all be straight?

You know, I honestly have no problem with folks who struggle to understand same-sex relationships, and the use of an already-culturally-loaded word to describe those relationships.  But let's be honest in our struggle.  Leave my family out of your scare tactics.  Because this is not about the children, no matter how much some people might want it to be.  My family is not going to corrupt or hurt anyone else's, nor is our existence going to change the sexual or gender orientation of anyone, child or adult.  My marriage is not going to disrupt anyone else's, and I refuse the blame for the supposedly soaring divorce rates.

And therein lies the problem with these arguments, and the main reason for the use of corruption-of-innocence scare tactics: who really believes that letting people of the same sex marry is going to somehow harm the marriages of opposite-sex couples?  Just try to make sense of it... then take two Advil, 'cause you'll need them.  The arguments that get to the heart of what this is all about - the loving commitment of two consenting adults - just don't hold up, so opponents have to go for the gut, and they have to hit hard.  It worked in California in 2008, and it worked in Maine just this past fall.

In the recent PBS special, "This Emotional Life", researchers suggested that what stops bullying is not the voice of authority from above, not a top-down system in which some higher power or institution penalizes the bully, but a negative peer reaction.  The only thing that stops bullying is for the witnesses to it to step in and say, "That's Enough."  Witnesses who remain silent, no matter their actual feelings about the situation, are perceived as accomplices or collaborators in the bullying, by both the bully and the victim.

The tactics used in these campaigns are pure bullying, and my beautiful baby is now a pawn in their schemes.  Isn't it time to step in?  Isn't it time to step up?  Isn't it time to say, "Enough"?

For more reading:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2010/01/11/state/n080724S48.DTL
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/01/11/BA1E1BGLU9.DTL
http://www.lesbiandad.net/2009/11/re-the-fear-on-behalf-of-the-children-meme/