the historic debate: lorn vs. mom on gay marriage

I watched a little bit of Monkey Face's (ahem, I mean, Bush) address tonight and was aggravated again by his stances on abstinence and same-sex marriage. Of course. Who in their right mind isn't? But I brought this up with my mom, and we promptly got into a discourse (ie, rather heated argument) about gay marriage.

It makes me shake to think that such a thing as a definition of marriage as man and woman would be put in the Constitution. In the bleedin' Constitution. It's just so fundamentally...wrong. My mom, however, interprets it not as denying rights to gays, but creating something that straight marriage advocates can keep to themselves. She argues that marriage is traditionally between a man and a woman, and therefore we should keep it that way. Give same-sex couples all the same rights and benefits, but call it something else. Marriage is for straight people, she says.

What?

First off, traditions change. "What's wrong with tradition?" she asks me. Well, tradition's all fine and good yo, except when it excludes someone from a civil right. Keep your traditions, but adjust them to the times. Make them fair and reasonable, please.

Secondly, how much does this smack of "separate but equal" to anyone else? Okay, so we've got equal rights on both sides, but only straight people can get "married" and gays "something elsed"? So my mom is married to a man. How is that marriage weakened, harmed, or even embarrassed by a man being married to another man? I don't think it's possible. It's just a word. A definition. Your own marriage should be what you make of it, not what other people are also participating in it.

But most of all, I am just absolutely baffled by her tenacity and stubbornness to retain this concept of "marriage" for straight couples. Despite my best reasons (but you create two different classes of citizens! tradition can't always stay the same! why does it matter?), I could not convince her. Marriage is to be specifically for a man and a woman. It's an aspect of the same-sex marriage debate that I can't say I've ever heard before, and it is quite the brick wall.

I was also interested (and somewhat amused) to hear that she thinks most people aren't homophobic. I wonder about that woman. She needs to see some more of the world. Just because we have Queer Eye for the Straight Guy doesn't mean we're post-homophobia. In the same ways we are by no means post-feminism or post-racism, we cannot claim that discrimination is a thing of the past.