So it seems like Prop 8 might really go down–at least until it reaches the Supreme Court, where Anthony Kennedy will decide for 20 million American homos what they can or cannot do.  I never really thought about it, but the courts really are a bad forum for the bad guys.  They aren’t permitted to appeal to emotional, middle-class hostility or rump religious sentiment, and phrases like “de-institutionalize the institution” of marriage probably aren’t going to gain traction, because they’re meaningless.  They cause people who already agree to nod along, but in terms of jurisprudence, they’re just breaths with sound on them.

Also, as dry as the judiciary is, lurid things like porn do come up a lot.  You can’t bank on judges’ discomfort with butt sex, because they’ve all had to read the case histories and they’re inured to it by now.  As Prop 8 was all about a vague feeling of distaste, couched in fearmongering and quasi-religious discourse only to gin up support, they might be screwed.  Especially since they’ve never demonstrated how two women getting married constitutes a concrete harm to heterosexuality or its adherents.

At the same time, here is a nice finding that crystallizes my irritation with same-sex marriage and why I always roll my eyes whenever some earnest citizen equates it with The Struggle.  As in:

A different study, published in 1985, concluded that open gay relationships actually lasted longer.  None of this is news in the gay community, but few will speak publicly about it. Of the dozen people in open relationships contacted for this column, no one would agree to use his or her full name, citing privacy concerns. They also worried that discussing the subject could undermine the legal fight for same-sex marriage.

Open relationships last longer.  Get that, people?  Open relationships last longer.  Not all people will be happy living monotonously, and, in my experience, the extra communication required to sustain an open relationship probably outweighs the jealousy factor.

As for my second highlighted passage, what a puker!  People form their own ways of relationships, and that’s great.  But to lie or cover it up because it might set back the movement is just awful.  Let’s fight for equality with some lies!

The idea that marriage has to be protected, out in public anyway, from “our” mutually permitted sexual shenanigans is really ghastly.  It’s undeniable proof that lots of people, gay and straight, get married to connvince themselves that they’re normal and to pre-empt neighbors and colleagues from thinking otherwise.  Marriage is an accessory to bourgeois living, before anything else.  Now there’s another added wrinkle of hypocrisy.  I say live in sin!

And 50%?  That seems really high.  I guess a lot of people are, well, closeted about their polyamory (or polyphilia or multiamory).  Which is fine, because it’s their business to share their business with whomever.  Although if more people were honest about it, it would probably help and not hinder the actual progressive solution to the marriage conundrum.  Which would be making marriage a totally boring, civil/bureaucratic procedure where you identify a person or persons who make all the decisions for you when you die or are hospitalized or whatever.  (Churches can do what they want, and in my progressive utopia, they wouldn’t have tax breaks so they’d wither away pretty quickly).  Your spouse would have to be a person because they’d have to consent and also be able to carry out your needs and wishes fully and faithfully.

So it couldn’t be a horse.  I’m going to draw a line in the sand and say that it’s wrong for a person to want to marry a horse.  I guess I fancy myself to be Mr. Supercool Lefty but I’m totally exposing my flank for anyone to call me out on what a reactionary I really am.  No mare-rriage!

There was a person who took the stand for the defense in the Prop 8 trial the other day and said that if we allow same-sex marriage, what’s to stop someone from marrying a horse [of the same gender?]?  That’s some really dumb shit, what that woman said.  Of course, my right to free speech is no more abridged or demeaned by her absolutely retardant utterance than her right to an opposite-marriage would be harmed by a equine-person union.