While reading Cynthia Nixon's recent post on the failure of the New York
State legislature to pass a gay marriage bill, I had an epiphany. As the corporate flack says in the movie Avatar,
"Look at all that cheddar."
Here's the problem; New York State is flat broke and we've got a 9 billion dollar gap in our forthcoming budget. Gay marriage is our solution, but only if we act soon
because we already have competition. Let's implore our dear
departing Governor to do more than just recognize that others have done the
right thing, let's demand that he make New York the Las Vegas of gay marriage.
Think of it as opening a foreign market up to our
exports, although in its current state of affairs it might be the most suspect
product offering since shipping the Pinto to Japan. In 1990 9.8 people for every 1000 of us in the United States
married. 10 years later it had fallen
to 8.3, and by 2006 it had fallen to 7.5. Half of all those who do get married, will get divorced. At this rate, if we restrict the legal right to marry
to heterosexuals, the marriage industrial complex in the United States will go
the way of factories.
Dan Savage writes that about four percent of
the population is gay so that works out to about 7,600,000 more marriage
eligible adults. Let's be optimistic and say
there is pent up demand for marriage in the gay community and so 20 percent of
them want to get hitched. That's 760,000 weddings
right? We make New York the funnest
place to get hitched, and we can capture half the gay nuptials every year.
Let's add up all that cheddar. Americans spend an average of $25,000 on their celebrations
but lets be honest, in New York you couldn't rent a closet large enough for the
Patterson re-election committee for that kind of scratch. Cynthia and Michelle aren't escaping the Waldorf for under $500k not
including their gorgeous, lesbian designed wedding rings.
I'm
going to say that the average wedding held in the city is going to run to
$75,000, therefore we could boost our local economy with an immediate jolt of
2.85 billion dollars, followed by another billion every year in queer
couplings.
But seriously folks, this is about love and light. It's about civil rights, it's about human rights. In preparation for writing this I asked my
father-in-law, Robert Leonard Powers, retired Episcopal Priest and esteemed Adlerian Psychologist, for his thoughts. His full comments are here, but I'm going finish out the
rest of this post with his last three paragraphs. He writes:
Old ideas about marriage, its nature, its
social purpose, its stability, and its sanctity have been steadily questioned
ever since the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the discovery of reliable
birth-control. This has occasioned a great deal of uneasiness, as any
disruption of custom and expectation is bound to do, and with this comes
viewing with alarm, denunciations, and rear-guard efforts to paste up the
shreds of patriarchal history.
Knowing this, there is certainly a touching
confidence revealed in the continuing idea that sacred ceremony can serve to
safeguard any personal (and commonly all-too-often impermanent) efforts at
fidelity and solemn covenant. When same-sexed couples
who treasure each other's being in the world want to present themselves
somewhere regarded as sacred space, and to act in what they want to be a sacred
way in declaring their desire to love and to cherish each other throughout the
vicissitudes of mortal life, it seems grudging to argue that they must be
refused whatever strength and consolation may come through a priest's prayers
and acts of blessing. We can only hope that now, in a turbulent time of change,
it may help them, when
they encounter refusal, to remember that for one thousand or more years any
sexual union of any kind was
refused this blessing.
To shift to my Clinical Psychology position, I can
only add that it is crazy to oppose the actions of people who mean no harm to
you, and do no harm to you. The less sympathy you are able to have for people
unlike you the more vulnerable you are to mental illness and every other
self-crippling limitation. The less you are able to treasure the variant on the
human possibilities of loyalty and mutual care represented by those whose
experiences of life are and have been, often painfully, unlike yours, and the
more hostile and antagonistic your feelings are with respect to them, the
greater the danger, to you and to the rest of us, that you will be inclined to
do harm. The commandment to love your neighbor as yourself has nothing to do
with religious customs and ceremony. It is the formula for the common life of
humankind, and of all life, and of all being, to receive, to pass on, and to
bestow the happiness that is at the heart of every Blessing.
Follow Steven Mesler on Twitter: www.twitter.com/kurokowa
Perhaps those who are opposed to gay marriage for religious reasons and unmoved by possible economic gains will be moved by my father's compassionate homily quoted at length by Steve.
Or swayed by the fact that my father marched in Selma Alabama in March of 1965, answering Martin Luther Kings call for religious leaders to join him in support of Civil Rights. My dad did so despite the fact that James Reeb, a UU minister, had been killed only a few days earlier and my mother was then gigantically pregnant with my older sister (now Steve's wife).
There were religious people on both sides of the Civil Rights struggle. Lots of hate was preached from lots of pulpits. I am very glad my father stood with Martin Luther King then, and is standing up for gay marriage now.
We will brag about Bob Powers in our family for centuries. I seriously doubt anyone brags about the preachers who sided with the segregationists against King. Their hate filled homilies may as well have been written on ash.
And I very much doubt that those preaching homophobia now will be remembered by their decedents with pride. Perhaps those not swayed by compassion will moved by a desire to have a place in a more loving future.
I saw a report years back by the GAO saying that federal recognition of gay marriage would save the country 10s of billions of dollars per year.
Those who are opposed to it are mostly opposed to it for religious reasons, so I don't think the financial incentive will sway them, unfortunately. But nice article.
Got it posted properly, hope you enjoy it with the images.
I did find this link:
http://www.glad.org/doma/lawsuit/
and would direct you to this paragraph in the link:
In another 2004 report, the Congressional Budget Office estimated the federal government would save $1 billion each year through 2014 if same-sex couples could marry nation-wide. You can see these reports and a GLAD overview of the GAO Reports here.
Notice that the link "here" in the paragraph does not work. But apparently the report came out in 2004. I'll keep looking if I get more time. Perhaps that's enough info, someone else can help google it?