I don’t really have all that much to say about the Massachusetts court’s decision regarding gay marriage, because I’m just too damn happy about it. Gay people are normal people who feel love just like anyone else, and deserve the basic human right to enshrine that love through marriage just like anyone else. End of story.
I respect the arguments made by same-sex marriage opponents like Eve Tushnet–who, insofar as she is gay herself, may be reasonably excluded from the ranks of gay-bashing troglodyte SSM opponents like John Derbyshire–but, frankly, I don’t buy a single one of them. Maybe it’s because I actually happen to be married, but the idea that as such I’m just some cog in a societal machine designed to produce and properly rear babies is dehumanizing and ridiculous to me. Doubly so, because, unless you accept specious and antequated theories about gender roles that successful same-sex or one-parent families are currently giving lie to day in and day out, it actually winds up being an argument for gay marriage, not against it. (Moreover, scratch someone who’s constructed elaborate legal and philosophical arguments against gay marriage, and more often than not you’ll find someone who thinks that God doesn’t like homosexuality underneath. That’s not the God I know, to put it mildly; and even if it was, that’s not how we do things in the United States of America, thank, well, God.)
Human rights were extended to a large group of humans the other day. Bravo.