Will My Marriage Last?

Thirty years have passed, but Californians are again being bombarded by advertisements suggesting that gays and lesbians are out to corrupt schoolchildren. One especially noxious ad by the Prop 8 campaign features a young girl informing her horrified mother, "Guess what I learned in school today? I learned how a prince married a prince, and I can marry a princess." Put aside for a moment that California Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell says schools aren't required to teach kids anything about same-sex marriage ("using kids to lie … is shameful," he intones in a No on Prop 8 commercial). Or that many parents have no problem with their children being taught about the existence of gay couples, since the purpose of an education is—presumably—to learn about subjects with which one is unfamiliar. But just like Briggs's supporters, the Proposition 8 team is preying on parents' fears that their children can somehow be "turned" gay if they encounter gay people or learn anything about the "homosexual lifestyle" (a phrase used by the religious right that is code for "burn in hell"). The irony of all this, of course, is that Reagan himself—protector of the family values that opponents of gay marriage say they are trying to preserve—determined that such arguments were bunk.

Had the Briggs initiative passed, my friend Kevin Allen, who attended my wedding with his husband, Mike Wallace, would never have been allowed to become principal of one of the top-performing elementary schools in the state of California. Watching the joy on my mother's face as Kevin boogied with her to "Dancing Queen" at my wedding reception, I couldn't understand how this gay-marriage business was a threat to anybody? But then I thought about my teenage nephew and what he said to me right after the ceremony, "I can't stand those Prop 8 people. They're crazy. Everyone should be able to marry the person they love" (or, as his father put it when he and my sister told him about the engagement: "Uncle David deserves the right to get married and be miserable just like we are").

Having a gay uncle certainly hasn't impacted my nephew's sexuality, as evidenced by the way he hit on my new sisters-in-law at the wedding banquet. But it has made him more tolerant of gay people, and that's something opponents of gay marriage have reason to fear. Young people are much more supportive of same-sex marriage than are their elders: in a national CBS News poll conducted this spring, 40 percent of respondents 18-29 said gay couples should be allowed to legally marry (only 29 percent said gay relationships shouldn't be recognized at all; 28 percent were in favor of civil unions for gay people). By comparison, only 31 percent of people 30-44, 28 percent of those 45-64 and 17 percent of those 65 and older said gays should have the right to marry.

Opponents of gay marriage don't like this trend. And because California is a trendsetter, they want to stop same-sex marriage here before it spreads any further. So the long-presumed liberal "Left Coast" has become the Gettysburg in our nation's culture war, with antigay protestors picketing while gay people dash to the altar as if they're being shipped to the battlefront tomorrow (according to some estimates, 20,000 same-sex couples will have been married in California by Tuesday). "This is ground zero in the war over what it means to have a family," says John G. Matsusaka, president of the University of Southern California's Initiative & Referendum Institute.

It's understandable that people who oppose homosexuality—either for religious reasons or just plain homophobia—are concerned they'll be forced to accept something they believe is morally reprehensible. A recent ad by the proponents of Prop 8 warned that churches could lose their tax-exempt status if they refuse to perform same-sex marriages. As evidence, the campaign pointed to a 2007 New Jersey case in which a lesbian couple wanted to have a civil union at a beach pavilion owned by a Methodist ministry but was denied use of the facility. While the state decided to revoke the pavilion's tax-exempt status, the Yes on 8 camp failed to point out that the status of the ministry itself was unaffected. Later, Frank Schubert, manager of Yes on 8, was forced to acknowledge "a church would be very likely permitted to refuse to perform a gay wedding in the church with no risk to their tax exemption."

Those who want to nullify my new civil rights tell me that's not really what they're doing. "Proposition 8 is NOT an attack on gay couples and does not take away the rights that same-sex couples already have under California's domestic partner law," it says on the ProtectMarriage.com Web site. "California law already grants domestic partners all the rights that a state can grant to a married couple." This may be technically correct, but my own experience with "domestic partnerships" is that they are the gay equivalent of the "colored only" water fountain. "In practice, same-sex couples have difficulty really getting the recognition and the protection under domestic-partner laws, because it's a separate system," says Jennifer C. Pizer, senior counsel of Lambda Legal and a coauthor of California's domestic-partner law. "Many institutions haven't understood their legal duties, and many couples don't have the knowledge to stamp their foot to get equal treatment," she says. Case in point: paramedics once refused to let my friend Kevin, the school principal, ride in an ambulance with his domestic partner Mike because they weren't married.

When Jeff and I decided to register as domestic partners in 2006 after five years together, we had no illusions that it was the same as marriage. In fact, we signed the papers specifically so we could take advantage of a two-for-one discount at a golf club that had fallen on hard times and was recruiting gay couples to boost its dying, retiree ranks. But we had to prove we were domestic partners before we could get the discount. So it was, that Jeff and I found ourselves at the home of an elderly notary, about to legalize our relationship by signing papers atop the washing machine in her garage (thinking better of the symbolism, we asked if we could sit down at her kitchen table). The following day, I carted the papers to a dank government office in downtown L.A., where I took a number, waited and then traded the forms for a certificate and a form letter from the California secretary of state congratulating us. The experience was hardly romantic, more like getting a visa at the Chinese Consulate than anything else. But now we could get our cheap golf membership—a consolation prize for not being able to marry.

Rick Warren, the evangelical pastor of Saddleback Church in Orange County, Calif., and author of "The Purpose Driven Life," has argued in favor of Prop 8 that, "There is no reason to change the universal, historical definition of marriage to appease 2 percent of our population." What Warren fails to acknowledge is that the "historical definition of marriage" has changed over the course of time. For most of human history, across many societies, "the preferred marriage was one man and many women," marriage historian Stephanie Coontz told me. "If precedent is our guide, shouldn't we legalize polygamy, bring back arranged marriages and child brides, and decriminalize wife beating?" she writes in her 2005 book "Marriage, a History."