Musings of an ex-fag

At the gym today, where most of the clientele are gay, one of my acquaintances asked if I had been down to the demonstration yesterday in Union Square to protest the passage of Prop 8, defining marriage as between a man and a woman in the California constitution.

(The State constitution, btw, is over 110 pages long. Yes. And has been amended well over 500 times. So it's not at all like amending the US Constitution, a mere 4 pages long and only 27 amendments.)

I said no, that it was a waste of time.

He said, with a friendly laugh, "What kind of a card-carrying fag are you?" I replied, without thinking, "I resigned." "But you can't, ever," he came back. "Watch me," says I.

I really do feel as if I have resigned. My erotic and emotional direction is fundamental and remains utterly unchanged and unrepented of. But my sense of identification with the "community" is fading all the time.

So, here are a few musings of an ex-fag.

Just because most people find it hard to grasp that the gender of marriage partners is accidental to marriage, after many millennia of universal experience, and don't see how the idea of same-sex marriage, barely a few decades old, suddenly constitutes a fundamental civil right, does not mean they are hateful bigots.

Bigot is now as useless a term as racist. Saw a T-shirt yesterday, "Bigotry is unnatural and perverse." Dude, what planet have you been living on? It is a natural as genocide.

Because I have friends who are directly affected by the issue, I have great sympathy for the disappointment felt. But stamping your feet and name-calling voters who won a legal vote...how is that much more than a tantrum. To say nothing of counter-productive. It only solidifies the opinion of people who fear what you are up to.

A local theater director, a Mormon, has had to resign his job because his contribution to the Yes on 8 campaign was exposed and publicized. Most gays say he deserved it and what did he expect, given the high rate of gay involvment in theatre. And if anyone who worked for a business with a conservative demographic was found to have given money to No on 8 and made to resign for it, would the gays say they had only themselves to blame? The hypocrisy is stunning.

One argument I hear is that the Equal Protection clause of the 1868 14th Amendment means that the government cannot restrict marriage to male-female couples. Presumably this would also validate polygamy. And I can see no reason why I could not marry my brother. Or all three of them.

But it also occurs to me that this makes the progressive income tax unconstitutional, since it penalizes the wealthy by a higher percentage of levy. No?

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