When I heard that the full text of the judge's ruling on Proposition 8 was available, I set everything else aside and dug into the 136-page document. Prop 8 had banned gay marriage in California. Judge Vaughn Walker declared that unconstitutional.
I wrote about this at length yesterday at the Huffington Post - take a look if you are interested. Here I'll briefly summarize a few of the points.
First, those claims about the transformative power of getting married that I've been trying to bat down for so long - they get taken seriously in the ruling. That was disappointing. The Judge did not need to claim that marriage makes people healthier or happier or any of the rest of it in order to rule that same-sex couples should be allowed to marry.
Another sad side of the story: In order to argue for the potential importance of marriage to same-sex couples, the ruling, I think, added to the discourse of singlism and matrimania. (Check out some of the quotes I mentioned in my post and see if you agree.)
Now here's the more interesting and less depressing part. The judge maintained that the opposition to same-sex marriage was based largely on untrue stereotypes and private moral views, and that neither could provide the basis for legislation. "California's obligation is to treat its citizens equally," he said. So shouldn't singles be treated equally, too? That's what I argued.
Now a personal note about how I work. Typically, I read comments posted here as soon as they come in. But on days when I'm preoccupied with something (as I was with reading and critiquing the Prop 8 ruling), I'll save them for later. So it was just moments ago that I caught up with the lively discussion of the post on dealing with put-downs. I loved discovering that readers were mulling over the same concept I was blogging about at the Huffington Post - marital privilege. The title of my post over there was, "Does the Prop 8 ruling make the case for ending marital privilege?"
Considering the sophistication of the discussions in the Living Single comments section, readers will probably not be surprised at the reactions to my post. The Huffington Post, as you may know, is mostly progressive in its leanings (though some of the people who post there are not at all liberal). Yet even there, the first few comments offered in response to my arguments already include some nastiness.
That reminds me of something else I could have added to my post about put-downs. When other people over-react, you've probably touched a nerve. Now it might not be much fun to be the misplaced target of their hostility, but perhaps it does mean that the topic is a meaningful one. It is worth pondering. People care about it.
