Gay Marriage is Just Fine

Gay Marriage is perfectly fine with me. Not because I'm gay, but because I believe in freedom, equality, and choice. Any two people who love each other and are committed to each other, should be able to express this commitment in some form recognized by society. Black people with Chinese people also, or Malaysians with Eskimos - one of them being a Catholic and the other being a Buddhist. One of them could be a sequencial hermaphrodite, and the other a bisexual . Fine. No problem. One of them can be a woman, while the other is a woman. One of them might have only one arm and a missing testicle, while the other has multiple-personality disorder and two vagini. I am open to many flavors of Legalized Love. I do draw the line however at humans and sheep. Dogs are OK, although pitbulls are not advised as there will eventually be arguments. I absolutely do not approve of marriage between humans and any species which falls outside of the Class Mammalia, such as reptiles, which are represented by four Orders: Crocodilia; Rhynchocephalia; Squamata; and Testudines, although it is quite possible for love and some form of commitment to exist between such disparate species - I would doubt however that the non-mammal individual is capable of confirming long-term commitment, especially if it requires the saying of vows. And then there is the problem of habitat.

I also do not accept marriage between some number of people other than exactly 1 (one). I also do not believe in marriage between a non-integer number of people, such as 0.23, or 9.4. Some human societies allow polygamy, and perhaps this is OK, as long as all the individuals in that marriage are happy with the arrangement - but my impression is that this not easily sustainable. A non-integer number, however, is not cool with me. A half-person for instance may find it difficult to make the commitment and would not be able to care for his/her spouse in times of need. This of course depends on which half of the person is missing. If the head is missing, then there is essentially no commitment, and probably no love - assuming love relies on brain chemistry. There may actually be sex in this case, assuming the genitals are intact. But this, in my opinion, is not sufficient to justify marriage, as it essentially reduces to a form of dildonics.

Why This Is Not Easy
Gay Marriage will of course be difficult to establish as a norm because of the strong traditions in human society, and the religious beliefs and practices of almost all peoples. But the human species is self-defining. We have taken control of our own evolution - like it or not, and therefore our definition. The existential reality is that humanity can and must continually re-define itself. This is both our curse and our freedom.

Evolving
Perhaps there will come a time, long after gay marriage has been established, or absorbed into the normal course of human institutions, when my own prejudices will seem outdated. I will of course be long-gone by then, but there may be a time when individuals of vastly different species (perhaps even of different phyla) will be lobbying to extend the laws to include them into the institution of marriage. Robots too, and perhaps complex software programs. People living a Second Life within a virtual world have already shown that Virtual Love can exist - love between avatars, where the real people behind the avatars have never actually met. There may be a time in the distant future when it will not even be possible to describe some people as being either male or female, human or non-human, natural or artificial.

As a matter of fact, television conservative Bill O'Reilly has already predicted interspecies marriage:
http://mediamatters.org/items/200509160009

In these future times, when such distinctions are blurred, humanity (or, rather, post-humanity) will come to see marriage as a pact between two souls (or two self-reflexive software entities) (or two cybernetic pigeons endowed with dildonic amplification) who love each other and want to stay that way for a long time, and make it official.

JJV (11/12/06)