My wife and I just left a movie theater where we saw Sean Penn's vital, vulnerable, brave, complicated performance as Harvey Milk.
For those who haven't seen the movie, a taste ...
Rather than use this space to mourn Harvey Milk's assassination or dissect the political lessons of his determined rise to elective office or review the movie or recommend one of my favorite books ever, I'm just going to follow Harvey Milk's example by being real and sharing a thought that's been clanking around my brain for a few weeks now.
The thought is simply this: While my relationship with my wife is going strong, my marriage has never seemed less important. For all the bigoted blather about how gay people undermine the true meaning of marriage, I -- on a totally non-political, human level -- feel exactly the opposite. My growing indifference to the institution of marriage grows precisely from my everyday experience in the company of gay and lesbian couples who embody the true meaning of marriage. Denied the right to marry, our friends nonetheless
Yes, I didn't finish that last sentence. Two of our friends showed up at the cafe where I was writing. I closed up my laptop and we all went to dinner. The friends are a longtime couple -- wonderful women who we and our kids love spending time with. I realize this seems fake, that the blogger in the middle of writing sterile words about his "everyday experience in the company of gay and lesbian couples" couldn't possibly have had his blogging interrupted by going to dinner with a living, breathing lesbian couple. But, people, we live in a world where Rod Blagojevich is real! In our post-Blago world we should recall what sportswriter Red Smith wrote in 1951 after Bobby Thomson's shocking, pennant-winning home run: "The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention. Only the utterly impossible, the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible again." See, Red Smith warned us about Blagojevich. He warned us about the interruption of my writing. Right? Anyway, back to what I was saying ...
Denied the right to marry, our friends nonetheless give each other all the care, love, honesty, loyalty, support, shelter, and shared laughter that marriage is all about for me. You can't spend much time around couples who accomplish all that in their daily unmarried lives without realizing that you don't need a marriage to love each other well. My marriage begins to seem about as essential as my appendix. Vestigial.
Look, I realize everything I'm writing here could be used to fuel the canard that straight people get their brains poisoned by being around gays and lesbians. Oh, that poor heterosexual husband! Being around those bad lesbians in Seattle made him question the unquestionable importance of marriage. Being around those bad gay parents in Hercules, California made him think he'd still be a good dad even if he didn't have a marriage license. Bad. Bad. Bad.
Well, whatever. Like people who build sandcastles too close to the incoming tide, people whose ideas are doomed to be washed away by history tend to spend a startling amount of time shrieking at unstoppable, inevitable forces. So get mad at me. Get mad at my friends. Yell yourselves hoarse. Wittingly or unwittingly, well-intentioned or vicious, you are the heirs to the fire-all-the-gay-teachers bigots depicted in Sean Penn's movie. The fleeting silence of your hoarseness will be golden.
The tide of history has been bearing down on the defense-of-marriage sandcastle for years -- since before "defense of marriage" became a catchphrase, since before legalized gay marriage became a remotely plausible goal. The tide of history has been bearing down in small ways and big ways. In person and on film.
The 1993 movie Philadelphia was ostensibly about AIDS and justice. But in telling us the story of a dazzling lawyer wrongfully fired by his firm because of an illness, the Oscar-winning movie also quietly showed a relationship between a Tom Hanks character and an Antonio Banderas character. Their relationship looked an awful lot like a marriage. Some might find that insidious. But no amount of shrieking at the tide can change the fact of those scenes Hanks and Banderas shared.
The sandcastle is further doomed when millions of moms around America watch as the nice young man who gives them interior decorating advice shows up on the screen with his friend Oprah, looking shattered because he just lost his male partner in a natural disaster.
Empathy, ultimately, is what dooms the defense-of-marriage sandcastle. Not radicalism. Not militancy. Not marches. Not boycotts. Those things are fine. They can be cathartic. People are free to do them. But simple empathy will eventually decide this.
What remains to be seen is how the decision will come down.
Will empathy eventually give us an inclusive institution of marriage?
Or will empathy eventually lead more and more people to where I find myself now?
Where I find myself now, my message for all those "defenders" of marriage out there goes like this.
Have "marriage."
Take "marriage."
If the word "marriage" is so fragile that it needs to be protected from the loving couples I'm privileged to call my friends, go lock the word up in a pretty box. Keep the locked box in your church. Share the blessing inside the box only with those you deem worthy. Let only those worthy ones be called "married." Refuse to recognize the legitimacy of gay weddings or secular straight weddings or devout straight weddings held within the walls of churches that interpret God's words differently than you do. Expect those churches to look with the same disdain on the so-called "marriages" of your faithful.
Pick a new name for the civil contract I have with my wife. Give it a clunky name if that will help you stomach laws that grant gay civil unions and straight civil unions the same set of rights now enjoyed only by married heterosexuals. Give it a name like an IRS form. I simply don't care. No name can change what my wife and I have with each other.
We don't need your blessing.
Stay out of our lives.