I'll Tell You When

On Tuesday, Justice Scalia asked when gay marriage became unconstitutional. This morning, I came up with a good answer. This is why I'm not a lawyer.

Gay marriage became unconstitutional when scientists realized that homosexuality is not a mental disorder, which I believe was in the early 1970's* (though I could be off by a bit. Perhaps they figured it out in the 1960's but it only got taken out of the DSM in the early 1970's.) Before that, it would have been unreasonable to allow gay people to marry, because people with severe mental disorders do not have standing to marry.

Since then, we have seen homosexual behavior in almost every species of animal we have studied, we have discovered a gene that causes androphilia (a strong attraction to men) in both men and women, and we know that the more sons a woman has, the more likely her younger sons are to be gay because of a hormone she emits more of during each successive pregnancy. So we know that homosexuality is natural. We have seen one after another group that formerly claimed to "cure" people of homosexuality admit that orientation can't be changed. So we know that it is immutable. And we have been through the plague of AIDS that permanently changed gay culture and an entire generation growing up without the idea that homosexuality is a mental disorder.

It was when my generation, born in the 1970's, came of age that the movement toward legalizing gay marriage began in earnest, and that's no accident. People my age were the first to come out in high school, the first to come of age post-AIDS, and the first to grow up knowing that homosexuality is just something that comes up in the gene pool about 3% of the time. It's only natural that it would be people my age who would expect to marry their partners.

So that's your answer, Justice Scalia. The day homosexuality came out of the DSM, gay marriage should have been legal because gay people are people and therefore eligible for equal protection under the law. Once we stopped "protecting" them from their "mental disorder," we should have given them equal rights.

Perhaps we can be forgiven for not giving those rights instantly, because most people then thought that gay people were different in the way they formed relationships. They always had been, of course, because they had to be. When the love you feel is classified as sickness, you don't date in public. But once a generation grew up knowing they weren't crazy, they expected and asked for the same rights straight people have. From that point on, we've been wrong. Just plain wrong. And now the Supreme Court has a chance to set it right.

So that's your answer, Justice Scalia. Now do you know how to rule on this?

*UPDATE 3/29/13: It was 1973. Thanks, Andy Drouin, for leaving that comment. So, 1973 is when it became unconstitutional. Got it, Justice Scalia? 1973.

Revenge is salty and delicious

Yesterday was a busy day. A really busy day. So busy that the only way I could have written a post is if I had turned down Boo's request to play Settlers of Catan.

There was a period of time where I had to drive from a Parent Breakfast a few towns north of us to our house to pick up Wonderdog, then to our dog school which is about 20 minutes away, then back to our house to drop Wonderdog off, then up to Boo's school, where I was meeting Hopper at a nearby diner for lunch before we both went to the school to work on a fundraising project. I was about half way from our house to the diner when I got a text from Hopper.

Where are you?

I was annoyed. I already walked out on my class at exactly 12:00, even though it was running over. I rushed home, got Wonderdog settled, grabbed my stuff and hopped back in the car. In my haste, I forgot to bring a snack that Boo would need at her after school activity and would have to buy one. I wasn't late, so why was he texting me? But I was at a red light (I only read texts when the car is stopped) so I texted back.

Ridgewood

A minute later, the phone beeps again, but now I was driving, so I just kept driving while I seethed. I tried to rationalize away my anger, thinking that Hopper probably just has a table saved, or wanted to know my ETA, or thought I got there first and he couldn't find me. He DOES have a habit, I reminded myself, of replying to every text, even when it isn't necessary. Probably that text just said, "OK."

When I arrived at the diner, I looked at my phone.

Aren't we meeting for lunch?

Well, that was odd. I had to drive through Ridgewood to get from our house to the diner, so "Ridgewood" seemed to me a reasonable, if terse, answer. But, I had arrived, so we'd soon set it straight.

I walked into the diner, and told the person who greeted me that I was meeting my husband. "He's not here yet," came the reply. "Would you like to sit at a booth while you wait?"

Not here yet? How was that possible? He had been pissing me off complaining about my non-lateness for the past five to eight minutes.

"But he's been texting me," I said.

The kind man agreed that that was strange, then helped me search the restaurant, where there were exactly zero men sitting alone. I decided the time for texting had passed, and placed an actual call.

"Hopper? Where are you?"

"I'm at the diner near work."

I humbly accepted the booth the man had offered and sat down to order for both of us, since it would take Hopper at least 20 minutes to get from his work to Boo's school.

When the food arrived, I texted Hopper to let him know it was getting cold.

Then I ate half his fries.

Eleven years married

"True love isn't something you find. It's something you are capable of." --Dan Savage

Savage also frequently says that there is no "one," only a .8 that you round up to one. His point is that we shouldn't wait around for Mr. Right, and we shouldn't hang on to a relationship that isn't working for us because this might be "the one" and if we screw it up, we'll never find true love.

He's right, but there is an element of "finding" that is important too. I don't believe that Hopper is "the one" in the sense that there is only one man in the world I could have made my life with.  I'm sure if I hadn't married him, I would have married someone else. But there are a LOT of people I couldn't make a successful marriage with (I dated several of them) and finding one of the few people who sits in the Venn diagram overlap between "people I can live with" and "people who can live with me" was challenging, to say the least.

Once you meet one of those few people, that's when you decide if you will round him up to "the one." You have to choose carefully, because the wrong person can really screw up your life. But Savage is right that it's a choice, and then you have to put in the effort to make it happen. There isn't some magical person out there, the finding of whom will make you happy for all eternity. Hopper is a good man. He's Jewish and comes from the same town I grew up in, so we have a lot of the same expectations about life. And (oh, yeah) I love him. I married Hopper because my left brain saw the sense in marrying him and my right brain wanted to do it. Today is our eleventh anniversary, and I can say in retrospect that it was a good decision.

There are other myths about marriage. People think it will make you happy. It won't.

Don't get me wrong--I love being married, and Hopper and I have what most people would describe as a happy marriage. But it's just a lifestyle. Marriage is a choice to make a new family. That's all. You're still you and still in charge of your own happiness. Sure, the wrong marriage can make you miserable, and it's a good idea to try to bring cheer to your spouse when you can--the occasional, unexpected chocolate purchase can go a long way. It's also important to monitor your spouse and help out when grief or depression takes over, as they can, or when something like the wrong job is dragging them down and making them less than they can be. In those ways, marriage can make your life better.

For me, marriage makes me happy because I like having someone to share things with. Well, not things--I'm really bad at sharing things--but experiences. And chores. I LOVE having someone to share the chores. (And by share, I mean do almost all of them so I can sit around and blog.) I like living in a family situation. I like co-parenting (most of the time) and eating family dinners and being able to break out a game for three people and having two other people in the house to play with me.

But nothing about me really changed when I got married. Hopper and I didn't live together before we were married, so that was new, but he moved into my apartment, so aside from having to share my stuff, it wasn't much of a change. I still woke up in the same bed and went to work at the same job. Of course, Hopper has a huge influence on who I am and what I do, because I chose him to be the most important person in my life (and then demoted him when we adopted Boo.)

It's my job to make me happy, not Hopper's, and not our marriage's.