I’ve talked about people who enjoy the close company of other
people of the same or similar gender before.
I remember discussing their traditional love of musical theatre, their almost
superhuman ability to match superfluous, but to the untrained eye wildly different,
sofa cushions, and also their general flamboyance. Which is something I wholeheartedly agree
with, if you’re gonna do something, you may as well do it fabulously!
But these tropes are only usually applied to gay people who
have ‘outie’ reproductive organs. What
about those with ‘innies’?
Well, I’ll be the first person to admit that I have more
experience with gay men than I have with gay women or [Whisper] Lesbians [/Whisper]
as some like to be called. (I’ll tell you
what, let’s get the jokes out of the way first, OK?)
Haha! I bet you have!
I can lend you a DVD
if you like!
Experience? With gay men?
Woooo! – you complete bender!
And so on…
But this is odd when you stop to think about it, because my
niece is ‘one of them’ and in a few days she will be getting married to her
female life partner (or they might be
being ‘civil partnered’ I don’t know I’m not au fait with all the ins and outs
of the process – All I know is that I’m probably going to have to dress up and
not drink anywhere near enough at the reception because: driving, just like I
would at anyone else’s wedding)
And that’s the thing you see – the thing that gets me, is
that when you think about it there’s no real difference between ‘Same-sex
marriage and Different-sex marriage… Apart from the details of what happens on
the wedding night that is, possibly. Again,
no first-hand experience, so I’m not qualified to judge. Keen readers will have noticed that I didn’t
say Normal marriage either, because, like, I used to own an owl, so my idea of ‘normal’
is different from most people’s.
What I’m trying to say, in an ugly and, on-the-surface completely
uninformed way, is that in my opinion, the union of two people who care deeply
about each other is a marriage. It
shouldn’t confer any more or any less rights and responsibilities on anyone
depending on the race, creed, gender, level of disability or even species of all
the spouses.
Yes, you heard me right… As long as the haddock loves you
and you love the haddock, they why not? (My
more vanilla readers might wonder how the haddock can give its consent to such
a union, but when a haddock really loves you, you just ‘know’ OK? It’s in the
eyes…) It makes no difference to me, or you, or that guy behind you trying
to read over your shoulder (He’s gone
now, don’t worry, although he did look a bit shifty and I couldn’t really see
what he was doing with his hands.)
There’s a quote you see sometimes on the Internet, often
attributed to the Writer and Comedian Liz Feldman (as it is in the example below – I’ve asked her if she ever actually
said it, and if she replies, I’ll let you know)
In case you have a smartphone with a tiny screen, it says, “It’s
very dear to me, the issue of Gay Marriage. Or, as I like to call it: ‘Marriage.’
You know, because I had lunch this
afternoon, not Gay Lunch. I parked my car; I didn’t Gay Park it.”
And that sums it all up pretty well actually, there are
people out there who’ve done the almost impossible, they’ve found the one someone
out of just over seven billion, that they want to (initially at least, at this specific point in time) spend the rest
of their life with in some kind of fulfilling relationship. What business is it of yours or mine? When it gets down to it – What difference
will them letting the world how much they love each other make to you, or me?
Let me give you a hint… The answer’s none, despite what
googly-eyed maddists will say it won’t bring down some random God’s wrath, it
won’t cause floods or hurricanes, or confuse children, or infect the
heterosexual majority and lead to record-shops selling out of KD Lang and Liza Minnelli. It won’t lead to a global outbreak of
sexually transmitted diseases, we won’t all get AIDS (Remember AIDS? It was like ‘terrorists’, but in the 90’s)
I’m incredibly proud of my niece and her partner; To be completely
honest, I’m slightly more proud of them than I would be if my nephew was
getting married to a female partner, because they’re doing something, out of
choice, that’s difficult.
Something that really, really shouldn’t be.
P.S. My pride in them has nothing to do with the fact that I
find it hugely funny that my father-in-law’s religion requires him to be
staunchly anti-homosexual . He’s not homophobic, he doesn’t fear them in the
slightest, he just treats them as Godless abominations… And he has no idea why,
other than some guy, writing a book of rules to keep the populace in their
place some time ago said that that’s how he should think.
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