Archive for the ‘Same-Sex Marriage’ Category
June 29th, 2011
|
Author: When it was announced late Friday that New York lawmakers approved same-sex marriage, I yelled excitedly across the apartment for my wife.
 |
When it was announced late Friday that New York lawmakers approved same-sex marriage, I yelled excitedly across the apartment for my wife. We just moved back to New England after years in San Francisco, and were thirlled to hear of yet another East Coast victory for gay-marriage advocates. We are, in fact, newlyweds ourselves — our ceremony last September was a windswept affair on a bluff overlooking the foggy, wild Pacific.
As a man who's married to a woman, you might think my position on same-sex marriage is a good-progressive one — maybe a deeply held belief that denying any group their civil liberties is a slippery slope, an objection a la Martin Niemöller — "First they came for the Communists, but I wasn't a Communist so I did not speak out . . ." Which is true, in a way. Neimöller goes on, famously, to say, "Then they came for the Socialists and the Trade Unionists, but I was neither, so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew, so I did not speak out. And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me."
The thing is, I care about gay marriage because I am a transgender man, and my wife and I are not legally married.
Because my birth certificate currently defines my legal sex as female, my marriage is, technically, a same-sex one — which means we join a long line of loving couples throughout history who've been barred from civil marriage through the brute, ugly force of prejudice.
Read more
Posted in 
Tags: