Playing a role in Prop. 102
What's the difference between a same-sex marriage and a "conventional" marriage?
It's not the sex. There are many sex-less marriages. If the media is any clue, there isn't much difference in the activities exclusive to heterosexuals and homosexuals these days.
Marriage — except in Islamic circles or others requiring proof of virginity on a wedding night — does not require sex.
It's not the ability to have children. With reproductive technology, most females can conceive. There is adoption and not even "conventional" marriages require children. As far as role models, extended family often provides multiple sources for either gender of child — if that's something you want to promote.
It's not even the gender of the participants. Women and men are both in "conventional" marriages. In other cultures, some marriages may contain either or both in the appropriate gender roles.
It's the fact there is no gender difference between the partners.
That's the problem for most people.
They wonder who the wife is and who the husband is when you talk about same-sex marriages. They aren't asking — to be blunt — “who's sexually penetrating who?"
What they are really asking is "Who is in charge," "Who tells who what to do," and "Who's the one with fewer choices?"
To many people, this is a very scary situation. They don't know how to mentally handle a marriage without this gender-role inequality. They don't know who to treat differently in a same-sex marriage.
Marriage — in the “conventional” sense — is not about a relationship.
It's not even about reproduction these days. What it is about is how people are treated by people outside their relationships and how society views the genders differently.
A gender-blind marriage would force people to deal with the fact that marriage is an instrument for forcing gender discrimination on a wholesale level and perhaps elicit a need to look at their own relationships.
This is why I — a straight, divorced man — will vote no on Proposition 102. I want people to look at how they treat the ones they claim to love and see how much society forces on them.
Carl J. Armstrong Jr.
Undergraduate
