WHY I SUPPORT GAY MARRIAGE, AND WHY I WILL NEVER BE ANGRY AT THOSE WHO DO NOT: "Armed Liberal"

...What is marriage about? It's about a deep commitment between two people who promise to care about and for each other. Historically, it has been tied to sex and procreation--which means heterosexual sex--but that tie is eroding, in the face of the increasing sexualization of society. ...

What it is that matters in a marriage? Commitment. Duration. Primacy. It is a commitment--which means that in the face of conflicting desires, you have to anyway. It has duration--meaning it gains in value over time. An old good relationship is better than a new one. ...And it has primacy over your other relationships. The act of saying to this person "You are the most important person in my life. Not my children, not my boss, not my pastor or anyone else matters more to me than you do," fundamentally changes both one's life and one's relationships to others. ...

...When [Steve, a friend] came out, he was fired by his parents from the family-owned firm that he was a partner at; when he got AIDS, he was fired from his job at Drexel. As he got sicker, he couldn't always manage his medical affairs, and his parents--who had fired and rejected him, became conservators of his estate over his objections. He didn't want them to take control of his medical care, so he asked me to.

He'd been in a committed relationship for six years at this point, and his parents undid much the estate planning he'd done to ensure his partner's financial security; his partner couldn't do anything about it--after all, in the eyes of the law at the time, he was a nonentity. His partner couldn't legally control Steve's health care without a document; and because of the legal conflicts over the financial matters, Steve was concerned that it would be invalidated. So I took the legal responsibility. His partner made the decisions; I was the formal authority that the hospitals could use to validate it. Because his partner was, after all, a legal nonentity when it came to the legal authority over Steve's care.

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[Eve adds that the comments to that post are also well worth your time.]
posted by Eve at 6:29 PM | link

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