=Admit No Impediments=

The price of societal evolution is eternal vigilance...

Especially seeing as the more vocal among the moral conservatives have made it their objective to keep bringing up that ethical atrocity known as the Federal Marriage Amendment each and every year until they manage to push it through Congress through sheer force of public annoyance...(do they think that'll actually work?)...

Well, I'm glad it got stopped, this time. But, despite my thanks to the senators who voted it down, whatever their personal leanings on the issue, I know that there needs to be a lot more work, not just in defending against the assaults of reactionaries but in truly rallying the forces of the progressive and humane among us -- not in half-hearted demurrals of authority to permanently forbid -- which is in itself illogical to an extreme when dealing with the evolution of legal rights and liberties -- but in bringing forward all the many reasons to allow and to expand the civil (i.e., secular, and general for all cases) definition of marriage IN full name and dignity. And this is a fight for visibility that has to start without delay, without resting on our vicarious and tenuous laurels just 'cause Bush and his cohort haven't succeeded yet in remaking the U.S. Constitution in their own theocratical image.

Last I heard, June was GLBT Pride Month, and the Religious Wrong has now mounted and failed its 'Tet Offensive' against the festal observance. So this year, all the rest of this month, let's make all those celebrations count as demonstrations, all our declarations as manifestos of a....a more-perfect ideal of union, more perfect because more inclusive and more true to ourselves and to every individual. Let the churches and synagogues and mosques and temples forbid whomever they will to be "married" according to their own rites and definitions and venues, but in a pluralistic nation the civil law should always be larger in spirit then the mainstream religious establishments -- otherwise its very existence becomes redundant, and the state effectively sanctions all the prejudices of the religions to whom it surrenders the reins of general law and its interpretation.

"Marriage" is not a word that belongs to the churches and the televangelists, to the Vatican or to the Southern Baptist Convention or the Orthodox Synod or to any assembly of religious authority -- and to let them define it and withhold it is an act of discrimination in itself on the part of those too cowed to assert that the law must serve the structural needs of all citizens, not just those of a particular faith (or similarity of faith), regardless of biological sex or social gender. The general law that serves for all must not discriminate against some merely on the basis of "moral majority", whether real or merely assumed by silence or suspension of verdict. We 've gone through that before as a country -- and don't you think we should have learned by now that legalized social discrimination doesn't work, won't last against inevitable social change, and wastes the true moral capital of the nation on hatred and paranoid defensiveness?

Marriage, as I see it pragmatically, is a civilly and legally-recognized bond of mutual (assumedly romantic) attraction to the point of choosing to share one's household, daily life and destiny with another individual, with or without the intent or ability to bear and/or raise children (even though blood/disease testing for a marriage license does presuppose intent to breed). By existing requirements, it is a contract entered into by consenting adults ("human" is presupposed and supported by the rest) of sound mind, of their own free and uncoerced will and without either one's intent to deceive the other. And really, that's all that needs to be defined about it as perpetually-standing rules, because those are the basic requirements of any stable and legal consensual relationship. To pin it down any further than that, particularly within the Constitution, is to make it an impedence to human reality, both for the future and right now (since time and affections have not been standing still and waiting for legal permission to proceed). And at the moment, I doubt you could find, on average, any more determined and devoted 'marriages' than the unions which now exist and persist and navigate their survival without benefit of the name that they fully deserve.

Which, really, is a far more a disgrace to the factions of society that are intent on enforcing their moral discrimination than to the demographic cluster that they're warring against so fervently....actually, I feel like putting that in even stronger words. So here goes:

The "sanctity of marriage", if one is particularly fond of using that term as a point of distinction, is currently and ironically best exemplified among those that some dare to refer to as "anathema", "abomination", "immoral" and other vehement epithets that fit distinctly ill with their speakers' own assumption of any positive moral or spiritual authority whatsoever, whether on this earth or beyond it.

There. Those that judge, expect to be judged yourselves, and by your fruits shall ye be known. I.e., if you're well-known for stoning your fruits and committing like actions, you're in some really deep trouble. And meanwhile the stone which the builders rejected, the same shall become the head of the corner....and seriously, people, any self-respecting Messiah would be ashamed to associate with these so-called "people of faith", much less condone them attaching his name to their vain and reprehensible crusades.