For Valentine's Day...

... Let's all decide how to allow homosexual couples to pursue happiness without being punished by the rigid fears and hatreds of others.

Being gay in the USA means that your family can deny your true love access to your hospital bed. It means you can't include the other in your insurance coverage. Perhaps least fair, you can't receive government-mandated marriage benefits (taxes, death considerations, more) given to heterosexual citizen couples even though you're as hard-working as anyone else. Personally, I don't care what this legal construct would be called - marriage, domestic partnership, civil union, contract, whatever works to make it fair - as long as the same construct is available to heterosexual couples.

Phooey on the claim that marriage benefits should be "saved for heterosexuals only since the institution was really created for the sake of the children," as certain nay-sayers would have us believe. If that were the case, what about childless couples? By choice, my husband and I do not have (and will not have) children; would these people deny us the right to marry? If we step back even further, older tradition and law would make my daughter's father my husband forever, and he would have vast economic and physical power over both of us. I shudder to consider that possibility.

Western-style marriage is more likely a holdover from those European traditions in which a woman (as breeding vessel) was a valuable commodity and had to be protected and traded for the appropriate reasons - usually to form unions with other families.

I imagine that pervasive current conservative middle east Islamic attitudes toward women hints at the way it was for all of us until relatively recently, in spite of those apologists, sometimes female, who claim the letter of sharia law "gives" women equality and much respect. In my mind, it's not "respectful" to allow a schoolful of girls to burn to death because they weren't wearing headscarves when they tried to escape the blaze. "Equality" does not describe the plight of an entire half of a population who aren't allowed to drive (or ride bicycles on public roads), show their faces in public, or go anywhere without a male family member escort.

But we aren't there, thank God, and it's just too bad that a free people denies official acceptance and equal justice to two individuals who dearly love each other.