Marriage equality

Tweeted by @CareNews - this article says some New York politicians who were previously on the fence about a bill that would give all marriages the same status whether the spouses are opposing genders or not are now supportive of it. I have never heard a good argument for requiring that married couples consist of one male and one female spouse. Homophobia is a hot topic and deserves a lot of discussion, but the other underlying issue is defining gender. Several years ago someone I was talking to (probably about the whole baby boys wearing blue and girls wearing pink thing) pointed out that gender isn't just one or the other. It's a range, with male being on one end of the spectrum and female on the other. You can fall anywhere on that spectrum and be defined by the characteristics that dominate. You can also change gender. I talked to a writer who over the years had befriended two transgendered people, both female to male. One had been married to a man and the other a lesbian before the change, so they became a straight man and a gay man. Very few people can say they've had the experience of being both a married woman and a gay man.

But you can't have a public restroom for each of these sub-genders, so it's easiest to just divide them into potties for people with wieners and potties for people who cannot pee standing up.  Summary: genders being opposite is really, really important to us, for better or for worse.

And for people who will never recognize a marriage between two people of the same sex, I want to say, "evolve."  But I do understand it being hard to accept from this perspective: a marriage with more than two people would really make me squirm. I would feel like my right to practice monogamy would be somehow threatened, and I don't know why.