Dear reader,
Already politics wears on my nerves. I find myself skirting around newspaper stands the same way I skirt around people shouting on street corners and handing out flyers to concerts I won’t attend. I flip through channels as fast as I can so that I do not have to watch CNN or FOX News and their endless, monotonous coverage.
No, I don’t fear the presidential elections; I’m more worried over the scuttle about same-sex marriage.
It seems that not a month goes by without a court challenge, counter-challenge, decision, vote, petition, protest or other newsworthy clip on the issue arising. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s an important issue, but the constant back and forth is quickly making me want to vomit. Just in Oregon alone, we go from having gay marriage in some counties, to having a constitutional ban on the institution, to having civil unions passed by congress, to having civil unions challenged, to having the challenge overturned, to becoming law and, just recently, to having a petition being brought against the law again!
Most political hot topics at least have a common ground where the majority of people stand, and extremists on every side who flail out over applications and details. If you ask some people about, say, taxes, most people will say that they are a necessary if poorly executed requirement of government; but if you talk about same-sex marriage, some people have firm opinions one way or the other, some get squeamish and cannot discuss the issue, some wonder why government is even involved in marriage, some wonder why we even have marriage at all, etcetera etcetera ad nauseum. Because same-sex marriage has no such common ground, the flailings take the form of a constant swing from one extreme to the other.
Same-sex marriage suffers from people using the same words but not talking the same language. To some, orientation is immutable, to others it is fluid; to some, gay means male, to others it can mean any gender (and no two people define queer the same way). The language isn’t constant, and it makes it hard for people to come to any agreement.
To a large extent the media share the blame for this. Most articles on same-sex marriage boil down to, “Oh look, two guys (or two gals) are getting/going to get/wanting to get married. How different!” Like there’s no greater spectacle than the spectacle of homosexuality.
Really, where are the bisexuals? Where are the intersexed?
I only learned of the term intersex a while back, but I think it’s an important one for the debate. It’s a generic term referring to anyone who does not fit into the classic male or female genders. Some examples include other sex-chromosome arrangements like XXY, XYY or XY females. Depending on the definition applied, the prevalence of intersex may be around one percent of the population. But the law and the laws regarding marriage are meant to apply to all people, not just 99 percent of the people. Where exactly do androgen-insensitive humans fit in under the law? Female, as they are biologically? Or male, as they are genetically? Who are they allowed to marry?
And where do bisexuals fit in ethically? To listen to the extremists on the issue, either they do not exist (moralists), are just a subcategory of homosexuals (radicals) or are confused straights or gays (absolutists). Yet, I know several bisexuals, and they quite clearly exist, are firmly their own category, and the only thing they are confused about is why everyone insists they are so confused.
Most media treatment of same-sex marriage, because it avoids these topics, avoids the reasoning behind it. Perhaps it is an attempt to be objective, but it just allows the issue to continue being fought on the grounds of male versus female, gay versus straight, liberal versus conservative.
We acknowledge the middle ground in such words as intersex, bisexual, or moderate, but we need to act on such words to understand them and what they mean. Humans do not exist as isolated groups; we exist as a spectrum, a beautiful rainbow of possibilities.
Until that realization happens, the issue will continue to sway like a boat in a stormy sea.
And until that happens, I’m staying away from CNN.
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