California's Proposition 8
I'm a dual US/Canadian citizen. There was a day, a couple of weeks ago, upon which I said, "I have never been more proud to be an American -- and I've never been more ashamed." I was proud that my fellow Americans had elected Barack Obama as president; I was ashamed that California had ratified Proposition 8, thereby overturning the rights of gays to marry in that state.
I've been nominated for over 100 awards for my fiction over the years, but two of the nominations that I'm proudest of are for the same award: my Hominids and Hybrids were both finalists for the Gaylactic Spectrum Award, which honours science-fiction that positively portrays gay, lesbian, bi, and/or transgendered lifestyles. So it should come as no surprise that I'm very much in favour of enshrining in law the rights of gays to marry.
I've been arguing for some time -- and am struggling (I have to admit) to make the argument concrete in the book that I'm currently writing, Watch -- that humanity is better off as a whole when the net happiness in the world is increased, and that no one has any business thwarting someone's else's chance at love and contentment.
I'm also appalled when we don't learn from history. So-called "separate but equal" never works; and, as a writer, to the very core of my being I believe that words matter: "civil union" is not the same thing as "marriage."
As I say, I've been struggling to find ways to say this in my fiction. But others are saying it with panache and passion, with clarity and conviction, with wisdom and weight. I'm very grateful to my wonderful friend Kirstin Morrell for drawing the YouTube clip below to my attention. It is MSNBC's Keith Olbermann talking about Proposition 8. I agree with every word.
[Direct YouTube Link]
[Full transcript in the comments section, below this post]
A couple of personal thoughts: unlike Keith Olbermann, I do have lots of gay and lesbian friends -- people I love dearly. The most-recent wedding I attended was a gay one, held here in Canada. That said, he's right, it shouldn't make any difference, because other people's marriages don't affect you, and they take nothing away from you.
And to the argument that some make that marriage is "supposed" to be between a man and a woman, implicitly because it's supposedly a union principally designed to provide infrastructure for biological reproduction by the two people involved, well, go jump in a lake.
I don't have kids and neither do lots of other wonderful loving married couples I know. We all got married because of love, and that's all the gay people in California, and so many other repressed places on Earth, want to do.
It may not be true in any Newtonian-physics sense that love makes the world go round, but the more love there is -- the more open, acknowledged, encouraged, supported love there is -- the longer we'll last. People who are happy make the world a better place.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Posted by Rob on Thursday, November 20, 2008
[Permanent link to this post]
2 comments
2 Comments:
well said sir, well said.
A transcript of the Keith Olbermann commentary:
Finally tonight as promised, a Special Comment on the passage, last week, of Proposition Eight in California, which rescinded the right of same-sex couples to marry, and tilted the balance on this issue, from coast to coast.
Some parameters, as preface. This isn't about yelling, and this isn't about politics, and this isn't really just about Prop-8. And I don't have a personal investment in this: I'm not gay, I had to strain to think of one member of even my very extended family who is, I have no personal stories of close friends or colleagues fighting the prejudice that still pervades their lives.
And yet to me this vote is horrible. Horrible. Because this isn't about yelling, and this isn't about politics. This is about the human heart, and if that sounds corny, so be it.
If you voted for this Proposition or support those who did or the sentiment they expressed, I have some questions, because, truly, I do not understand. Why does this matter to you? What is it to you? In a time of impermanence and fly-by-night relationships, these people over here want the same chance at permanence and happiness that is your option. They don't want to deny you yours. They don't want to take anything away from you. They want what you want—a chance to be a little less alone in the world.
Only now you are saying to them—no. You can't have it on these terms. Maybe something similar. If they behave. If they don't cause too much trouble. You'll even give them all the same legal rights—even as you're taking away the legal right, which they already had. A world around them, still anchored in love and marriage, and you are saying, no, you can't marry. What if somebody passed a law that said you couldn't marry?
I keep hearing this term "re-defining" marriage. If this country hadn't re-defined marriage, black people still couldn't marry white people. Sixteen states had laws on the books which made that illegal in 1967. 1967.
The parents of the President-Elect of the United States couldn't have married in nearly one third of the states of the country their son grew up to lead. But it's worse than that. If this country had not "re-defined" marriage, some black people still couldn't marry black people. It is one of the most overlooked and cruelest parts of our sad story of slavery. Marriages were not legally recognized, if the people were slaves. Since slaves were property, they could not legally be husband and wife, or mother and child. Their marriage vows were different: not "Until Death, Do You Part," but "Until Death or Distance, Do You Part." Marriages among slaves were not legally recognized.
You know, just like marriages today in California are not legally recognized, if the people are gay.
And uncountable in our history are the number of men and women, forced by society into marrying the opposite sex, in sham marriages, or marriages of convenience, or just marriages of not knowing, centuries of men and women who have lived their lives in shame and unhappiness, and who have, through a lie to themselves or others, broken countless other lives, of spouses and children, all because we said a man couldn't marry another man, or a woman couldn't marry another woman. The sanctity of marriage.
How many marriages like that have there been and how on earth do they increase the "sanctity" of marriage rather than render the term, meaningless?
What is this, to you? Nobody is asking you to embrace their expression of love. But don't you, as human beings, have to embrace... that love? The world is barren enough.
It is stacked against love, and against hope, and against those very few and precious emotions that enable us to go forward. Your marriage only stands a 50-50 chance of lasting, no matter how much you feel and how hard you work.
And here are people overjoyed at the prospect of just that chance, and that work, just for the hope of having that feeling. With so much hate in the world, with so much meaningless division, and people pitted against people for no good reason, this is what your religion tells you to do? With your experience of life and this world and all its sadnesses, this is what your conscience tells you to do?
With your knowledge that life, with endless vigor, seems to tilt the playing field on which we all live, in favor of unhappiness and hate... this is what your heart tells you to do? You want to sanctify marriage? You want to honor your God and the universal love you believe he represents? Then Spread happiness—this tiny, symbolic, semantical grain of happiness—share it with all those who seek it. Quote me anything from your religious leader or book of choice telling you to stand against this. And then tell me how you can believe both that statement and another statement, another one which reads only "do unto others as you would have them do unto you."
You are asked now, by your country, and perhaps by your creator, to stand on one side or another. You are asked now to stand, not on a question of politics, not on a question of religion, not on a question of gay or straight. You are asked now to stand, on a question of love. All you need do is stand, and let the tiny ember of love meet its own fate.
You don't have to help it, you don't have it applaud it, you don't have to fight for it. Just don't put it out. Just don't extinguish it. Because while it may at first look like that love is between two people you don't know and you don't understand and maybe you don't even want to know. It is, in fact, the ember of your love, for your fellow person just because this is the only world we have. And the other guy counts, too.
This is the second time in ten days I find myself concluding by turning to, of all things, the closing plea for mercy by Clarence Darrow in a murder trial.
But what he said, fits what is really at the heart of this:
"I was reading last night of the aspiration of the old Persian poet, Omar-Khayyam," he told the judge. It appealed to me as the highest that I can vision. I wish it was in my heart, and I wish it was in the hearts of all: So I be written in the Book of Love; I do not care about that Book above. Erase my name, or write it as you will, So I be written in the Book of Love."
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