Traditional Marriage Can Have Many Definitions (Page 2 of 2)

We talked to a number of legislators from our area, and we got a variety of responses. One said he would vote against amending the Constitution; one said he would probably vote for it, but reluctantly—he knew he shouldn’t, but he had to face the voters. What seemed to make the difference was whether these lawmakers actually knew any gay people. One man surprised us by being open and thoughtful—we had prejudged him to be a status quo defender. But, he said, “My brother’s wife’s sister is a lesbian, and she’s a good person.”

Good ole boy Frank Nicely, though, was running scared. “I don’t want to have to explain to people that I have an old-timey marriage,” he said, as if he thought his constituents might suspect he had some other kind. “It’s like pizza,” he said. “When you order pizza you get a bread crust and tomato sauce and pepperoni. They don’t bring you fried chicken. You order pizza, you get pizza.”

Well, bless his heart, Frank doesn’t get out much, I guess. I asked him if he’d ever been to a gourmet pizzeria, maybe in California, or even an upscale place like the one in Charlotte my brother always takes us to. “You can order a pizza there,” I said, “without tomato sauce. You can get a white cream sauce on it, like an alfredo sauce.” I was pushing it, but Frank had heard of that, I guess, because he didn’t object. “Or an asparagus cream sauce,” I said. “With broccoli topping. They make it on a big round crust, and cook it in the oven, but it comes out white with green things on top. Now, would that be pizza?” He allowed as how, yes, he guessed so. “Even though it doesn’t look like the pizza we’re used to?” Well, yes. “And they seem to do a good business, there. So even though it may have taken some getting used to, people seem to like it.”

Frank didn’t like it. He got up to excuse himself. Had somewhere to go. Earlier in the conversation, he had told us he admired Jimmy Duncan’s principled vote against the war in Iraq. He agreed with Duncan, too, about the war. We explained that Duncan was able to vote his principles and was skilled enough to come home and explain himself to a conservative electorate and actually rose in people’s estimation. Maybe Frank could do that, too—lead people a little, help bring in progress. My comrade Paul asked him if he would vote with us. “No, not likely,” he said. Too hard to explain to people back home (he doesn’t think his constituents are all that smart, I reckon). Paul said, “I bet you would have voted for the war, too, if you’d been in Duncan’s shoes.” Frank hesitated for a minute and said, “Yeah, I probably would have.”

So give him points for honesty. Don’t know that it offsets the bigotry, but it’s something.

When Tennesseans are asked to vote on marriage, I don’t expect many will think very long. But I hope some of us will, because it’s worth thinking about. The idea of a democratic society extending equal rights to all its citizens is a value worth embracing and voting for.

What we have now, an institution that entangles church and state, a strange hybrid of the sacred and the secular, is a good example of how right the founding fathers were when they decided to keep church and state separate. Myself, I have always thought the power of marriage was what happens in the church. Will Campbell used to start weddings by signing the marriage license and pointing out it was just a piece of paper—a contract honored by the state—that gave the couple the legal right to sue each other. Then he would set it aside. “Now, let’s get down to business,” he would say.

Marriage should be held in high regard, way higher than it is in a society with a 50% divorce rate and even more failed marriages than that.

For the state, marriage is easy. You don’t even have to love someone to get married. That’s not on the license application. You have to have some ID, you have to take a blood test, you have to pay the fee, you have to get someone authorized to sign the paper. For the state, it’s about your legal rights, and it carries over to health insurance, property rights, a whole lot of things we should not be discriminating against people over.

But marriage is really a spiritual bond between two people. At its purest, love is involved—love is the whole deal. Not infatuation, but a deep and abiding commitment to another human being, tested over and over by the strains of living together. And it is not limited to opposite genders, as profoundly loving gay and lesbian couples have proven for centuries, usually so very privately that you wouldn’t notice.

If the conversation about marriage heats up here in Tennessee as we approach Nov. 7, remember this: What you will mostly hear is fear dressed up as argument—fear of change, fear of the unknown or misunderstood, fear of what others might think. It is fear rooted in bigotry, which itself grows from ignorance and lies.