DESECRATION? DEDICATION!

Comedians have made jokes about the gay-marriage controversy along predictable lines: why shouldn't they have the same right to be miserable that the rest of us have? Rauch's book turns that offhanded ridicule of the institution on its head. In few books about matrimony will you read descriptions that so powerfully evoke the married state as a blessing for human beings. It is the yearning of the exile, the hunger of the disenfranchised. Even the dedication packs a wallop: "For Michael. Marry me, when we can." To characterize this sort of devotion as desecration is reprehensible. Anyone who defines marriage largely in terms of what happens in bed has never been married. Which may explain the Catholic Church's official reaction.

Like the naturalized citizens who are expected to know more about America than those of us born here, gay couples are being held to a standard the denizens of Vegas chapels and divorce courts have never had to meet: to justify the simple human urge, so taken for granted by the rest of us, to fully and legally come together. Just as it's common to see an immigrant take the oath and then kiss the ground, the result of all this enforced soul-searching may well be a fervor that will honor an embattled institution. Gay people are being asked to form a more perfect union. In the process, perhaps they can teach us something that we casual citizens and spouses badly need to learn.

© 2004