Whom We Choose

A new year arrives and queers still can't marry. The ruling gang is still screaming for a law against it - admitting to the world that they want their institution extended as a privelage to the gang, rather than as a right which a rational government should protect for all adults.

The news tells me that a pop star with too much time and money on her hands has eloped with a friend at a little Vegas chappel. The next day, they waltz into court and have the marriage annulled. It's great to see how highly regarded the institution of marriage is held today by our culture's elite.

I am not going to moralize on how one should never be allowed to end a marriage, or that one must make a marriage work, no matter how severe the adversity involved. I recognize the many reasons a relationship may end, and that divorce, separation and loss are common and necessary parts of life. The potential end of a relationship should not prevent any individual from marrying, and being married should not be an invincible barrier to change. However, I find it particularly infuriating that someone can so casually play with such a powerful legal and social instrument. So many people do.

It's easy to get married, get divorced and do so over and over again - if you're among the privelaged majority entitled to this right. At the same time, to take such light advantage of this privelage whilst failing to recognize it as such, describes the majority of those who partake thereof. I'm sure there are few among America's once-and-possibly-still-married population who actually consider the fact that they are playing with a right not all of us enjoy. Or if they do consider this factor, how do they justify their society's moral failure to extend such a basic right to all adults, without resorting to religious hysteria or poorly-disguised bigotry?

To any middle-class John and Sally who are exchanging rings today, please take a moment to think about what marriage means to you. If you consider it a hobby or casual activity to be engaged in at whim, please look closer at the immense legal and social machinery you are setting in motion, and then ask yourself whether the ability to indulge in your particular form of casual entertainment necessitates the sidestepping of all rational principles. You are taking for granted something which your lawful government - and mine, for I support and defend it as well - protects for you, but does not for me.

Your government's duty is to ensure your right to life: your right to dispose of your life as you wish; your right to liberty: your right to choose your family and to live as a single fiscal and legal unit, not to be compromised by any outsider; and the creation of your own happiness - all of which are impossible so long as the whim of the state trumps your choices in the disposal of your rights. Marriage is not the only such exclusive club in the game of rights in the legal world today. It's only the most blatantly obvious, and least defensible.

You, who are permitted to marry: please keep in mind that so long as any right is perceived as a permitted indulgence by the state, that no rights are safe. Do not allow your leaders to tell you that this issue is any different from the right to property or the right to choose your career: so long as such "rights" are protected selectively, they remain merely spoils of the rulers and their gang. By sharing in those spoils without understanding them as such, you are aiding in the maintenance of tyranny.

You who wish to enjoy marriage as a right are logically required to understand that right, and why it is necessary - regardless of culture, religion or caste; and you must question why your country protects that right for you, but not for us all.