California's Newlyweds

For some reason or no reason at all, we haven't been focusing much attention on the topic of marriage equality. But this week gay and lesbian Californians got the right to marry, and lots and lots of them have been taking advantage of the opportunity.

The L.A. Times:

After all the angst and hoopla, the first full day of same-sex marriage in California on Tuesday turned out to be almost placid, if you discounted the whoops of celebration or the courthouse crushes of brides and brides, and grooms and grooms.

The weight of history, the sense that this was a signal moment in the decades-long battle for gay rights, was lightened by joy and relief as couples -- some of whom had waited decades to marry -- took their vows amid smiling friends, proud relatives and beaming government officials.

Aside from a few low-key demonstrations, opponents of same-sex marriage largely stayed away from the celebratory scenes being played out at county buildings statewide, concluding that acrimony would probably detract from their November ballot measure to change the state Constitution to outlaw the practice.

Behind the scenes, though, the seeds of what could be an epic political battle were being sown.

For hundreds of gay and lesbian couples, Tuesday was a day that intertwined the personal and the political.

Chelsea Thompson, 24 of Anaheim and Bonni Millon, 24, of Long Beach arrived at the Los Angeles County clerk's office in Norwalk at 10 p.m. Monday to save their place in line.

"It's a monumental day," Millon said shortly before the clerk's office opened Tuesday morning. "We're changing history and we wanted to be a part of that and support the other people." Gay marriages begin with a day of hope and hoopla

To me, this "controversy" is a perfect example of the kind of divisive issue that has tied our country in knots in recent years. The issue is ... what again? The issue is that a majority of people are heterosexual, they can't imagine loving someone of their own sex, and so they don't think it should be allowed. There's no other sense in opposing it.

Does anybody deny that gay people can love one another? That gay couples can stay together for a lifetime? That gay couples can raise children and love them and have them grow up to be good, respectable adults? There's really no doubt about any of this.

And there really is no case that allowing gay people to marry will somehow affect the strength of anybody else's marriage. It seems to me that the simplest step of logic proves that there is no causal relationship at all between one couple's marriage and the stability of another couple's. And the "institution of marriage" -- so it changes, opposite-sex couples will continue to fall in love and marry, start families and fight over the remote, gay people marrying doesn't change any of that. There's no threat to the institution of marriage.

There are those who think it's not a real marriage because gay couples can't reproduce without outside help. But I doubt those same people would believe that individuals who are sterile for some reason -- say a war veteran who has been injured and can't produce sperm or ova -- shouldn't marry, or older people, say widows and widowers who are unable to have children, or don't want to. That's not much of a reason to stop people who want to marry from doing it. The stability of a family seems like reason enough, the commitment and the responsibilities and the privileges of the promise of a lifetime together, you don't have to have kids to have a marriage.

I think the bottom line is that it's just hard for people to imagine a life different from our own. We expect people to be like ourselves, and when they aren't there is some tendency to judge them negatively. And this egocentric tendency forms a kind of cornerstone for the belief system that has in recent years been called "conservatism:" it's the identity politics of the majority.

Most of us realize, at some level, that we do tend to favor our personal point of view, and we correct for that. It takes some effort to grant someone the benefit of the doubt, but we do that, we realize that our own personal world is not The World.

Californians will be voting on the legality of same-sex marriage in November. I used to live there, I know there are a lot of conservative and small-minded people there, besides the stereotypical hippies and cosmic New Age space-cases. Besides LA and San Francisco there is a huge inner valley of small towns, farmland, oilfields, it is an oversimplification to think of California as a Blue State just because of a couple of coastal cities. The vote could go either way, but I think that a few months with these marriages being recognized by law will make it easier for people to accept the reasonableness of marriage equality. California will not likely we wiped out by acts of God before November, life will not change for most people in any noticeable way as our society evolves, as the arc continues to bend toward justice.