One unfortunate aspect of Tuesday's vote is that gay people have now acceded to the status formerly reserved for black people. Thus, in the best Jim Crow tradition, bigots in California, Arizona, and Florida felt free to enact laws and amendments prohibiting gay people from marrying.
Why gay people would wish to marry is a question for another day. More immediate is the question of why straight people would give a shit whether gay people marry or not. Bigotry, plain and simple, is the obvious answer. But there may also be something more interesting at work.
What's so special about marriage? What's behind this hysterical assertion that marriage is an institution into which only a man and a woman may enter? Having successfully avoided it, at least to date, I'm probably not the best person to ask. But I have an idea.
The real function of marriage is and always has been to control sexuality, mainly by attempting to restrict sex to those licensed by church and state to produce children. No doubt the bigots who enacted the gay marriage bans find the idea of people having sex for fun repugnant. Gay people, of course, have no other reason to have sex. It's either fun or it's nothing.
How disgusting.
Also, how threatening. Because if married people start having sex for fun, who knows where it might lead. Women might get ideas. Maybe sex is fun. Maybe this whole patriarchy thing does suck.
Holy shit! We'd better put a stop to that immediately. We'll tell them God told us to do it.
