Gay Marriage: Clearing the Aisles
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Here’s the ugly scenario: the vast majority of straight—or gay—couples desirous of legal union are hopelessly unequipped to make this decision. You know this is true. And it is true because, with every decade gone by in which the concept of perpetual sacrifice and compromise — which, romance sadly notwithstanding, is the bearing wall of marriage — is lost, the individual cannot grasp what that commitment he’s so antsy to make is all about. The last five or six decades have seen a surge of personal entitlement in this nation unknown since Rome began making bad deals to keep the barbarians happy. It isn’t so much that today’s American is selfish; it’s more that selfishness has taken on new, respectable names, and is rendered increasingly a virtue. Under any name at all, it is poison to the being of marriage.

And I am more and more convinced, with each passing year, that, since it is chiefly in the interests of the state and its society’s structure that marriage be maintained, it is bloody well time that the state took some responsibility for the ever larger nuptial debris littering the landscape with each passing year. The marriage license should be made very, very difficult to get. As with firearms, an automatic waiting period should be mandated. A year, maybe. Yes, a year. And testing, too, ought to be required within that year. Updates, as it were, on the couple’s state of being within their couplehood.

No, I am not opposed to gay marriage. Nor do I violently picket the traditional variety. I like what marriage is supposed to be about. I like the depth it demands, the less than sensational rewards it carries, even the grim price of surrender of self it extracts. But the institution, as is, as we have altered it through the alterations in ourselves and our expectations, is a dismal mess. And throwing gay bodies on top of it is no solution. For anyone.

© Jack Mauro, All Rights Reserved. Article provided by GayLinkContent.com