Coupledom

As the Supreme Court hearings on the unconstitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act and Proposition 8 are debated online, on radio, and this evening, on one of KRON4's alternative channels, I've been alternating between Facebook and its sea of red equal sign profile images, with hundreds of creative variations.

I just finished a chapter where Reid listens to Everett use his amazing debate skills on another issue relevant to the setting of the sequel, the early 1980s.  I'm wondering if he would have have considered debating gay marriage rights, if they could even imagine this situation, where hundreds of thousands of people take to the streets in multiple cities, and the multiple aspects of these lawsuits are beguiling, if not confusing.

Of course, the clearest example of the need for them to eventually have a legal marriage is health-related. What if Everett, or even Reid, are hospitalized? The impossibility of one of them not being granted access to the other's hospital room is horrifying.

Perceiving Everett, who is a paraplegic, as the most probable character to be hospitalized may fall into stereotyping. but all of the scholarly books about disability involve sections about healthcare, about disabled people redefining themselves, not as 'patients,' with a condition, but people empowering themselves.

You see the connection.

Yet as thousands protest in the street, and outside the courthouse, the Supes are fascinatingly removing an entire population to the abstract. That's what these people do, in between Justice Scalia making idiotic statements, and the utterly corrupt Justice Thomas saying ... nothing.

I just heard Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg's "skim milk" comparison. While it's funny to hear laughter in the Supreme Court, it's also frustrating to once again hear our lives, my life, and the (hopefully ongoing) fictional relationship between my characters, decided upon by other people.

Some couples are infuriated by the hypocrisy and the waiting. They are literally and figuratively seeing red.

Complicated issues get people upset: Democratic President Bill Clinton whipped this whole thing up. Marriage is an outmoded patriarchal institution. Once disapproving Republicans are now turning around and coming out in support of marriage equality. Others claim that it is a "conservative value," because it removes the government from dictating rights.

But smart people on both sides agree what the Solicitor General, I think, said: "DOMA was enacted to exclude same-sex married couples from federal benefits."

"This is discrimination in its most very basic aspect."

Multiple studies have proven over and over again that gay and lesbian people make just as good parents, if not better (LA Times article). Marriage equality lawyers hurl out clear points again and again.

On the other side, the frumpy Maggie Gallagher, who had a bastard child out of wedlock, and seems to have a bottomless pit of resentment about that, is one of very few representatives willing to spew repeated "moral" opposition to gay marriage, but no factual proof of its detriment to sham marriages like hers.

Her Prop 8 colluding support included money laundered via the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic religious group, and the Mormon Church, another allegedly religious organization (that seems to act more like a Ponzi scheme).

See, I'm seeing red again.

But what calms me, what lets me know that we shall overcome, is not just the thousands of little red equal signs (or Grumpy Cat or Bacon or other equal signs), but the couples themselves, the ones I know, who share their sweet adorable images of their families..

Some of them are visible, some of them are not, but I met them; gay and lesbian couples with varying degrees of physically ability, caring for each other, being married without legal recognition, and hoping for a future that is no longer decades away, or a fiction. And several of them are old enough to have been as young as Reid and Everett way back when. I'd like to think that today, they are among those thousands signing on to make a little visual gesture toward justice.