As a member of the gays
I'd like to give some information to Curt Winzenreid (Left and morality not always in sync Nov. 10) and Annie Mitchell (Passage of Issue 1 reflects Ohio beliefs Nov. 15). First of all, I wouldn't necessarily call you bigots; I reserve that honor for the truly deplorable. But I would call you both uninformed.
To understand truly the backlash and hate the gays are feeling since the passage of Issue 1, one must look at the institution of marriage in the United States. Marriage is not an unchanging institution and saying so is simply ignorant.
Marriage can be many things, including power. Marriage can be used by a majority to hold power over a minority. Let's look at some public policies:
In the United States, Miscegenation Laws were on the books in some states until the late 1960s. These laws prohibited interracial marriage. Now, I don't think non-Caucasians did anything to deserve this gross ban; who knows, maybe they flaunted their skin color. These laws were hate/fear-based discrimination that defined marriage in order to further emphasize the inequality between whites and non-whites.
Now, let's take a look at women and marriage. Until the N.Y. Married Women's Property Act of 1848, the United States followed the Law of Coverture: under this law a woman's identity was covered by her husband's. So, any property a woman brought into marriage went to her husband, and society saw women as second beings to their husbands (or fathers and brothers, if they were unmarried). At the time, some even claimed the Bible sanctioned coverture.
When a woman married, she legally and symbolically belonged to her husband and had no identity; however, she still had a criminal identity! A woman couldn't own property, but she could be prosecuted for a crime. I'm sure these women had it coming to them, what with their uteri and self-reliance.
Annie, I don't think you would enjoy living in a world of coverture, but a majority of people believed in coverture, so you would have been out of luck. Don't worry; it wasn't personal.
Issue 1 reinforces the current heterosexist balance of power in the United States. It sends a clear message of who is the majority and who is not. It was passed by an uninformed, fearful public to stabilize an ever-changing institution and to deny people fundamental rights.
So, blaming the gays for this passage is insulting and preposterous. I flaunt my sexuality? That's a hasty generalization, and last time I checked, I've never had sex in the street.
You know who flaunts their sexuality? Those damn heteros. Everywhere I look, they're holding hands, kissing or chalking on the sidewalk for their straight clubs. It's a hetero-invasion!
Now, I have a live-and-let-live mentality
but that doesn't mean I have to accept the in-your-face mentality of those straights. But, I do accept the straights
and I love them (well, most of them), because I've gotten to know and to love them. I've taken time to meet them and to see them as people: people who love and who want to marry their lovers.
I don't view heterosexuals as a generalized, less-than-human group of people bent on converting others to their sexually deviant ways. To me, they're individuals. If you get to know the gays
you'll see we're the same as you straights -although our fashion sense is so much better.
-Carl Schottmiller is a sophomore English major. Send him an e-mail at carl.schottmiller@ohiou.edu.
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