7. Now, the Final Frontier

I am weird.

I do strange things.

And while I could tell you about all of them, let's not for now.  The one I do want to tell you about as I am letting my hair dry before bed is my habit of arguing with myself in the shower.  Typically I do this on important things.  Sometimes I am arguing between what I want to do and what I feel I should do, and some times I am debating my impression of a person or political viewpoint that I disagree with.  I often argue about gay Christian issues in steamy squatting poses at the end of the day.

Tonight, I was again thinking about the many arguments that I have heard against gay marriage.  Tonight, in particular, I was thinking more about the claim that allowing gays to marry will open the door for anyone to marry whoever they want.  Fathers will marry daughters, 3 women + 2 men, 1 woman + 3 men, cousins marrying cousins, stepparents marrying stepchildren, pedophiles and young children, and let's throw in a goat or a dolphin into the mix for good measure.  They are saying that allowing gay marriage will allow anyone to marry whoever or whatever they please.

Well, I actually agree with this, but probably not in the way they think.

Yes, I think you should be able to marry whoever you want.  That is a legal right you deserve, but then that requires a few points about marriage to be clear.  Or at least two points of my humble opinion on the matter.

Marriage is a life-long commitment between willing and commited participants.  It is an internal agreement.

There are a lot of reasons for marriage, good and bad, so I think that gay marriage will definitely send out a signal saying "Hey, we need to think more about what this actually means, and we should reconsider who has rights."

Let's start with Star Trek (thus the title), incredibly popular, even with conservatives, but unfortunately it contains bestiality.  Yes, that is right.  Think about it.  You have how many different half-humans running around the galaxy in our living room tv's.  It all started with Spock, and then there was Troi (plus some incidental characters), and well I don't know that many more off-hand, so you will have to comment with more characters.  Let's face it, the idea of a half-human is not new nor strange to us (Tolkien anyone?), but these would be classified as bestiality by a strict application of the conservative paradigm.  Why is there this discrepancy?

Simple.  It is because the idea of tow loving, sentient creatures making eternal vows (or sometimes just making babies) is a comfortable, happy, natural idea.  Disney even capitalized on this in Beauty and the Beast.  Sure, we know that he is human, but she has to see his nature through his exterior.  So long as the alien has human characteristics, we do not mind the love-making (which is also why we don't like when Leia is getting stroked by Jabba the Hutt), we see these characters as normal and equal.  They are independent enough to choose for themselves and engage in the relationship that they feel is best for them.  I bet there could be a church wedding scene for one of these "offensive" couples, and it would slip entirely under the radar.

The one group that has most to gain on the coattails of the gay marriage movement is the polygamists.  Now, before you balk, ponder this.  In many third world societies, a man who takes many wives is considered generous.  Not perverted, not evil, not vile, not greedy, but generous.  He is providing for more mouths and removing more financial burdens from more parents.  Now, don't get me started about the ills of a society that represses women, this is not radically-feminist-gay-man-blog.  But this does make me think that polygamy warrants another look.  If they think it can exist for a good reason there, maybe it can exist for a good reason here.  When it comes down to it, all of the people in the relationship have to agree to the arrangement.  Who are we to tell them that is not sacred.  And since when was pairing all the Christian rage?  It certainly wasn't started with Jacob or David or Solomon.

So, let's stop writing these people off on both sides of the argument.  Conservatives say that it will lead to all kinds of "debauchery;" liberals say no instinctively, and try to eliminate connections between gay marriage and other marriage; I say "Maybe. I'm just going to have to think about this a little more."