Life Beyond The Box

Recently when talking or writing about my “husband” I’ve started to refer to him as my partner instead of husband. I’d like to take a moment to explain why.

(Warning: Mild ranting ahead.)Whenever the subjects of gay rights and/or gay marriage come up in politics, I tend to end up getting perturbed at the very least. I’m all for religious freedom and the right to worship whoever and however you please. In fact, I rather like having legal protection to not being burned at the stake, thank you.

It seems a large portion of our officials and those they represent have forgotten that the Founding Fathers had other odd ideas, such as the Separation of Church and State.

Frankly, I don’t care if your religion proclaims this or that is immoral or just plain bad. You can believe what you like, that’s fine. You even can be a pigheaded, hateful bigot; it’s your right to be that way. As long you aren’t actually turning it into violence against those you hate, or infringing on their rights, I’ll even defend your right to be that way. I don’t agree with your opinion, but I’ll defend your right to have it.

“America isn’t easy. America is advanced citizenship. You gotta want it bad, ’cause it’s gonna put up a fight. It’s gonna say “You want free speech? Let’s see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who’s standing center stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours. You want to claim this land as the land of the free? Then the symbol of your country can’t just be a flag; the symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest. Show me that, defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms. Then, you can stand up and sing about the “land of the free”.” ~ Andrew Shepherd, The American President

What I do care about is when you start shoving your religious beliefs into our legal system.

When it comes to the issue of legal gay marriage - to give homosexuals in a committed relationship the same legal status and rights as a heterosexual couple in a similar relationship - it’s not got anything to do with religion. Even if your religion uses the word marriage for their spiritual joining of a couple, it’s not the same. The term “marriage” being debated is a legal term not a religious one, which according to the separation of church and state can not nor should not mingle.

If you don’t believe every committed couple should have the same rights, period, then maybe we should just disband the whole legal concept all together. Then everyone will be on the same legal playing field. Let the religions worry about the joining of souls rituals/ceremonies and rules. They can call it whatever they like; marriage, handfasting, or glueing for all I care.

For this reason I’ve decided to start using the term “partner” instead of “husband”. We have preformed no religious anything relating to the subject, so we are only partners legally. If everyone had the ability to establish the legal status of being married no matter their genders, “husband and wife” would be obsolete. Partners, or something similar, would have to be used.

I know it’s only a word, but in the words of the Czech writer and dramatist, the last President of Czechoslovakia and the first President of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel:

“I really do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can prove mightier than ten military divisions.”

Or of the writer Orson Scott Card in Maps in a Mirror:

“At last I was able to explain that I hadn’t understood the implications of my statement in their language, that I was transliterating and certain words had different meanings and so on and so on.”