Gay Marriage Issue Won't Go Away

Only hours after the California Supreme Court knocked down gay marriage, my friend of nearly 20 years sent me an e-mail.

"I think it's human nature to want to keep somebody as the 'other,'" Jackie wrote. "And since it's clearly no longer acceptable in our society to base 'other' on race or ethnicity, we're the population that's gotten the punch.

"How can opponents of gay marriage argue that, on one hand, we're really a much smaller community than 10 percent of the population, and at the same time argue that giving us the benefits of marriage would be cost-prohibitive for employers and the government?"

It's a reasonable question with no reasonable answer. And that has been the problem so often in the debate over gay marriage.

The opposition depends on emotions to fuel the cause, churning up waves of fear and alarm in the hopes that they eventually can extinguish the call for justice.

They brandish Scripture like a conquering sword, but leading religious scholars don't agree on interpretation.

They also like to say that same-sex marriage undermines heterosexual unions, but they offer no evidence, no statistics. They can't describe what this so-called "undermining" looks like or how it works.

Will we love our heterosexual spouses less? Will we smack our foreheads with the sudden recognition that we, too, want to be gay? They do argue, after all, that homosexuality is a choice, a "lifestyle" that can be fixed with prayer and the will to just say no.

Science increasingly indicates otherwise. We can no more choose our sexual orientation than the color of our eyes.

Day in and day out, year after agonizing year, gay men and women continue to endure these hurtful attacks for one simple reason: They have no choice.

Years ago, when I first started writing about gay rights, I often would mention my friend Jackie and her partner, Kate, but never their full names. I thought I was protecting them, but what I really was doing was suggesting they have something to hide.

What a disservice to these remarkable women, Jackie Cassara and the Rev.

Over the years, we've shared families and foes and too many private jokes to count. We've cried ourselves limp, laughed until we couldn't walk and insisted on seeing the best in one another regardless of evidence to the contrary. We are family without the wounds.

This is why gay marriage matters to so many straight people like me.

This is a civil rights issue, yes, but for me, it's personal, too. So many of us have a Jackie and Kate in our lives. They're called Patrick and Jeremy … Melanie and Tina … Matthew and Mark. …

Share enough days and dreams, and the questions start to gnaw:

How can we stand by as honorable people suffer one indignity after another simply because of whom they love?

How can we be silent when these Americans, who love this country just as much as we do, are denied full citizenship because of the genders of their beloveds?

The answer, of course, is we can't.

The hope is in our numbers, which keep growing.

The day after the California ruling, the two lawyers who represented opposing sides in the epic battle over the fate of the 2000 presidential election joined forces to fight for gay marriage.

David Boies, who represented Al Gore, and Theodore B. Olson, who represented George W. Bush, shared a stage in San Francisco to announce their commitment to overturn California's Proposition 8, the ban on same-sex marriage.

Gay marriage, they said, is not a partisan issue.

"If you look into the eyes and hearts of people who are gay and talk to them about this issue, that reinforces in the most powerful way possible the fact that these individuals deserve to be treated equally," Olson said.

Boies patted him on the back. "I couldn't have said it better."

And I couldn't agree more.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and the author of two books from Random House: "Life Happens" and "… and His Lovely Wife." To find out more about Connie Schultz (cschultz@plaind.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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