TKM

I’ll bet you thought we’d forget, caught up as we are in our own California drama. It’s true that we do tend to get a little insular way out west, but you can’t blame us, really, given the constant predictions—and fervent wishes—that “the big one” will finally hit and we’ll just break off and float out to sea, an island at last. (For the record, geologists say that the way the tectonic plates are arranged, an earthquake with the power to move our land mass would more likely shift us farther north than detach us from these United States, so the rest of the country is kind of stuck with us—and us with it.)

Even on this, your first day of legal same-sex marriages, you seem to be in an excellent position to maintain your equality, since Connecticut is free of the often-whimsical constitutional initiative process that allows tyrannous majorities to reverse court protections for less-than-popular minorities. And since the free-thinking citizens of your state have just voted down their once-every-20-year opportunity to mount a costly constitutional convention—so prayerfully endorsed by the God-loving, homo-hating Family Institute of Connecticut—you’ll have plenty of time now to show the good people in your state that, just like those of your Massachusetts neighbors, your marriages will do nothing to threaten theirs. The failure of your constitutional convention’s passage being our nation’s sole ballot question that could be considered a gay-rights victory this election cycle—however indirect, and however much we can thank the role of fiscal concerns, over nebulous ideals of equality, for their influence over practical Nutmeggers—we owe a debt of gratitude to Connecticut voters for that tiny ray of light that pierced the California-Arizona-Florida-Arkansas sweep of homophobic darkness.

And I just checked an online poll in the Hartford Courant that has y’all ahead in the public-approval sweepstakes, with 68% of respondents saying they support the right of same-sex couples to marry (with 22% saying that they do not, thanksverymuch, and 10% saying that they support civil unions only). True, this is based on only about 9,000 responses so far, and truer, this is a question that shouldn’t even have to be asked in 2008—as natural as homosexuality feels to many readers of this blog, this would be, for us, akin to a newspaper querying readers on whether blue-eyed people should be allowed to marry brown-eyed people—but still, it’s a promising start to a hopeful time in your state.

Alas, we’ve been too busy protesting Prop. 8’s passage to shop for a gift, but what I would personally wish for you is this: I hope that the joy you take in your weddings is as breathtaking and liberating as the joy I took in mine. I hope you get that newlywed feeling—even those of you who have been together for decades. I hope you feel, as I did, like first-class citizens at last, at least in your own state, and that you walk a little taller with your husbands and wives as a result.

I know that you won’t take your marriages for granted. I have yet to meet a same-sex couple who has treated their right to marry with anything less than stunned reverence. We have wished and hoped and fought for this for far too long to see it as anything less than what it is: equal recognition, at last, of our right to love.

Mazel tov!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 at 3:48 pm and is filed under politics, the gays. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.