Love is a beautiful thing, we all know, between man and woman, a woman and her kitchen and a man and his dog. But when it comes to love between a woman and a woman or a man and a man, the tambourine-banging religious right will tell you, it's dirty and evil and not at all what God had in mind. They know that for sure.
Their best argument is that a male and female are structurally created to have children while the other kind of arrangement doesn't allow it. Forget adoption and sperm donors; if you can't have kids the old fashion way, you don't have a right to legal marriage. That's what the tambourine bangers say.
But love isn't just about gender. It's about sharing and trusting and caring about each other. It's about wanting to be together for life and about surviving the many crises that torment us along the way.
I've always known this to be true, and the movie "The Kids Are All Right" fortifies that belief. It tells the story of a lesbian couple raising two teen-aged children and it is almost predictable in the conventionality of its plot: the kids can be a pain, the boy has the wrong kind of friend, one of the women feels she's bearing the financial burden of the whole family, the other goes to work and then has an affair and eventually they heal and everything is all right, the end.
That's a simplistic version of a complicated arrangement, but it must be said that gay marriages undergo the same pressures that traditional arrangements do. Our reactions to one another are human, crossing lines of gender to express love in a hundred different ways. In the ordinary course of our lives, as in the ordinary course of the movie, we pause to share our gratitude for a partner we have chosen for life, man or woman.
I say all of this by the way of cheering U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker's ruling that slams down California's Proposition 8, the anti-gay marriage amendment, with a loud bang. He called it unconstitutional and irrational, but then restricted the immediate resumption of same-sex marriages in California to allow time for an appeal. A Circuit Court subsequently extended the ban.
Thirty-nine other states have laws that bar same sex marriages, which tells you how far conservative Christians will go to prevent an intrusion into what they consider to be the sacred qualities of traditional marriage. Five states and the District of Columbia recognize gay marriage.
The U.S. Supreme Court will ultimately determine what the law of the land will be. One hopes that elements of both compassion and equality will enter into the court's judgment and leave the final definition of love to the fire within rather than the rage without.
