September 17, 2008
Gay Department
"Do you, Party A, take Party B..."
Moby Kip points us to this story by Jennifer Garza of the Sacramento Bee:
Last month, Rachel Bird exchanged vows with Gideon Codding in a church wedding in front of family and friends. As far as Bird is concerned, she is a bride.
To the state of California, however, she is either "Party A" or "Party B."
Those are the terms that have replaced "bride" and "groom" on the state's new gender-neutral marriage licenses. And to Bird and Codding, that is unacceptable.
My first reaction was that this was just more of the usual anti-gay griping---the bride's father is a pastor who's trying to start a movement for couples to refuse to sign the marriage form---and it may well be just that, but it's their marriage, isn't it? Why can't they be a bride and groom if they want to?
When they saw the terms, Codding wrote "groom" next to "Party A" and "bride" next to Party B and submitted their license. On Aug. 16, they married at her father's church.
On Sept. 3, the couple received a letter from the Placer County Clerk-Recorder Registrar of Voters informing them that their license did not comply with California law and that the state did not accept licenses that had been altered.
So, they literally would have been happy writing "bride" and "groom" in the signature boxes on the license, but some inflexible clerk wasn't going let them get away with that kind of anarchy.
You know, those of us who support same-sex marriage have had to respond over and over to the accusation that it would "destroy marriage." That has never made sense to me. My marriage doesn't change when other people get married, regardless of whether the other couple is a man and a woman, a man and a man, or a woman and a woman. Marriage is not a scarce resource, there's plenty of it to go around, and gay marriage doesn't take anything away from straight marriage.
Or so I thought, until the State of California made a liar out of me.
"Those who support (same-sex marriage) say it has no impact on heterosexuals," said Brad Dacus of the Pacific Justice Institute. "This debunks that argument."
I know it's a trivial issue, but thanks to the perversity of the government of California, the bigots are technically correct. Gay marriage does hurt straight marriage. Just a little, to be sure, but now we're going to have to listen to all the I-told-you-so ranting.
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Well, while that is "just a little", it's awfully little.
I think that more "hurt" is done to the feelings of those folks who are bothered by the "married" club being opened to same sex couples, myself. (I'm not one of them, but I do know a few.)
All social changes -- even good ones, like I've concluded that SSM is -- do come with costs. I'll be delighted if the worst costs that come from SSM is are a few irritations over "Party A/B" and some hurt feelings.
That said, this would be easy for the CA lege to fix, if they wanted to; just allow/require the official marriage license to put a box next to Party A/B in which the parties could write "husband", "wife", "spouse," "cuddlebunny," or whatever if they wanted to.
That's pretty much what I was thinking.