— by Hephaestus
Know that I’m old enough to remember being glad that I was age prohibited from getting drafted to go to Viet Nam, so this whole “Gay Marriage” thing has been a real head-turner for me. In the beginning, I was against it, and I wasn’t even really sure why. It seemed sort of like trying legislate the rain to fall “up” instead of “down”. Rain was going to fall the same damned way it always has regardless of how Uncle Sam wanted us to call it. What puzzled me was why I was more opposed to it than the mere irritation I felt when I was suddenly compelled to turn “graveyards” into “cemeteries”, “cripples” into “handicapped”, “colored people” into “blacks” or “drunks” into “alcoholics”. It was more than just word chicanery for some reason.
Eventually, I figured out that having the homosexual fellers get “married” took something away from my own marriage. It changed the definition on me, not just on them. From my perspective, saying I was “married” got me not respect but sympathy. Being married was like getting a purple heart medal. It showed you’d suffered an injury. You’d taken one for the team. Not that you were particularly smart or able or brave or something, but it represented suffering. A public acknowledgement of pain and suffering you’d endured for the benefit of all the rest of you bastards in society who didn’t have to suffer.
You ever hear a man tell his buddies he’s getting married? It’s not like all the girls squealing and congratulating, and talking about shopping for dresses or flowers or caterers for dang little sausages and fruity-bubbly-booze. No. A guy who tells his buddies he’s finally knuckled under and marrying the woman gets him a full round of groans, dismayed slaps of foreheads, and questions of “why?!”
Instead of questions that girls ask, like ”where are you having the wedding” or ”show me the ring”, a guy’s buddies ask things like “What happened?”, “is she pregnant?”, “did she threaten you?”, “are you dying?”, “is she dying?” These are typical questions. Then, there are loud groans of well wishing sympathy and offers of assistance in somehow still getting out of the thing, if he wants to.
So this being the case for as long as human history has stumbled along, I wondered why the heck homosexual fellas would voluntarily step into this mess? Guys don’t want to get married if they don’t have to. For at least 7,000 years, these particular guys had the perfect excuse, so why mess it up? I’d been figuring that’s the very reason they’d picked up the nickname “gay”. Most guys would be pretty happy to never have to spend hours of time and piles of money to slowly cajole the object of his desire into having sex and never have the “marriage” discussion. By my recollection of those days, that’d make us all pretty damn “gay” all right. We’d be friggin ecstatic!
So, once again, I ask why the heck would they want to screw up the pretty darn good thing they had going for them? Then it hit me. The “purple heart”. Nobody wants to get shot or blown up or break a leg or have a piece of shrapnel in their butt cheek, but there was some general acknowledgement and appreciation afterwards from society that they’d suffered for everybody’s sake. And that was when I knew why I resented “gay marriage”. It was precisely because they could still be “gay” while doing it. Where was the suffering? Marriage was an acknowledgement that I had been suffering, largely for the benefit of society.
Marriage had always meant that everybody in society knew that all my hard-earned cash was going to be spent by some woman on shiny or fluffy or creamy or smelly stuff that I otherwise wouldn’t have accepted as free gifts. That wedding ring meant that everybody who looked at it could assume that I EITHER had children in my home, who would break my valuables, deny me a decent night’s sleep, waste my water, electricity, candles, gasoline, nails, screws, tape, staples, sugar, salt, and, most painfully, my hot water, OR that I was committed to having some in the near future. In short, I was committed to vast amounts of suffering so that one woman would be taken care of and humanity’s next generation would be created.
Marriage was a mark of suffering, a medal of self-sacrifice, and those gay fellers hadn’t earned it.
Then, I started thinking about why the government (which has always monopolized the “medal giving” business) was suddenly so damn anxious to start giving the marriage medal to these homosexual fellers. And it finally hit me. As usual, that old reprobate Uncle Sam must be getting something out of it. It didn’t take me too long after that to cotton on to what was really going on here.
After Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn all got started up, to help the spying spooks and snoops create big data-bases of who is connected to who, and how, so the government could track us all down easier, they realized there was a whole community out there that they didn’t have down on paper or their hooks into. The gay guys!
When men and women linked up, they informed the government by getting married. Their kids were all documented by birth certificate and the links between their families were all established all legal like. Their files were stapled together. Easy to track, easy to trace, and easy to tax. The government got to know who was connected to whom, through what, and for how long. If there was a split, they would document that too. Better still, they kept paying Uncle Sam for every step along the way. Married? Pay a fee to government. Pay the marriage penalty on your taxes and document every single dang person in your household. Got divorced? You have to let the government know and pay the court system for the privilege. Anytime you asked for benefits or used social services, you had to list your spouse in your claims to determine eligibility. Same for medical costs or lawsuits or child support. Every stop along the way, some government body, somewhere, gets either a cut of the action or a way to refuse a payout.
The government had figured out that the homosexual community was living outside of their nets. This had nothing to do with freedom or fairness or kindness or any other of the sugary balderdash they always use to cover their swindles, schemes, and shenanigans. This had to do with a new information net and revenue source. The government busybodies absolutely could not tolerate having even a small segment of society living out from under their dirty thumb or grasping hands!
There, I figured was finally the real reason to turn 7,000 years of custom on its head and stir everybody up. It made the king richer and more powerful.
Now, as soon as I realized what was going on, the whole homosexual marriage thing didn’t bother me so much. The homosexual fellers were getting a purple heart medal without suffering the injury, but it was an award in advance. They were about to get themselves injured too. By my figuring, it was probably going to hurt them a lot since they hadn’t anticipated what was coming and didn’t have the long history of coping skills that straight men had developed. Poor bastards have no idea what was bearing down on them. It was going to hit like freight train, too. I felt so bad for them. I knew they deserved the medal. They weren’t going to have to suffer the unique and ongoing Chinese water torture that is sharing your whole life with a crazed member of the opposite sex, and likely several maniac hobgoblins for 18 or more years, but they were suddenly going to be fellow intimate slaves of the government, just like the rest of us.
So they got the “medal of suffering” for marriage, but now they are probably going to give up the nickname “gay”. Pretty soon, it ain’t gonna apply anymore, as they’ll be dang near as miserable as the rest of us.