Not "Gay Married" Married

With the ruling by the Supreme Court issued last week, let's drop the qualifier of "gay marriage" and just call it marriage.   The qualifier already creates a different category which can't help but absorb and to an extent justify inequality.   If you want to see what that includes, you can do what I've been doing and raise the apparently odd idea that gay people who marry should have a right to expect faithful monogamy in their marriage and see how people can't believe that's a possibility.   That is even believed of marriages of  lesbians, I was surprised to find out because, if anything, lesbians I know who are in a stable relationship are probably more likely to be faithfully monogamous than the straight couples I know.   

I said the other day that if the marriages of gay people aren't held to include faithful monogamy, we are already making it an inferior bond, and marriage is a voluntarily entered into bond, an agreed to restriction in some aspects of choice entered into on a mutual basis or it is a bogus marriage.   If we regard our marriages as not including that, WE will be the ones accepting an inferior status for our marriages and any families that might result from those.  If the marriage doesn't come with bonds to care for each other for better or worse, in sickness and in health on a continual basis until death do us part, it is a mere economic contract without any personal and emotional commitment to each other and no one should expect more from it than financial advantages, which already degrades it and makes it less than those marriages which are true pledges of support.  As I mentioned the other day, the inclusion of sexual fidelity in the promises we have a right to expect of the agreement of marriage is especially relevant to gay men, given the very real possibilities of one spouse becoming infected and passing on AIDS or other STDs rampant in the gay population.  That is, of course, something that straight folk, who are also prone to that possibility, to consider in the degradation of marriages among them.  

The successful marriages I've seen, with benefit of an officiant or not, have been among people who took the promises they made seriously.  They have pledged to constantly work at it through all of the problems that are bound to come up, through the disagreements, the stupid mistakes with money, with selfish behavior, etc.   Some have even endured the realization that one of them could probably have "done better" or that romantic love tends to fade.  Though it is very possible for an immature relationship to come to a more adult appreciation and respect which is probably better than the idiocy of immature infatuation which the movies, TV and stupid novels have led us to think of as the highest point of marriage.  Which accounts for why so many people in those businesses tend to seek out one after another, after another of those relationships and they never grow up but may merely get too old to fool around anymore. 

Worst of all is the cynical immaturity of sex advisers in the media who are among the greatest scoffers against the possibility of gay folk having faithful, mature, adult marriages.   Perhaps that is due to the fact that the people who seek advice from such unlikely sources of good advice tend to be the ones in a relationship with selfish, immature people, quite often that person being the one asking for the advice.   I doubt most people in good relationships give such personal pundits much business or material to make into columnage.   If I were looking to make a good marriage, they're about the last place I'd look for ideas.