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Friday, November 5th, 2004

Gay Marriage? Get a firetrucking life, people!

The current theme in the blogospere is that it was the state amendments banning gay marriage that brought out Bush’s base. What is it about other people’s relationships that threatens some people so? Years ago it was loving someone outside your tribe, then your class, then your religion (How many good Roman matrons were heard to shriek “You’re marrying a Christian??“), then your age, then your race, then your religion again, then your race again, etc. etc. And despite all warnings, no society has collapsed because of the “destruction of marriage.” Throughout history, conservative elements in every society have tried to control who people marry, and throughout history, Love–always seen as a divine force, in every culture–has thumbed its nose at them:

Let us live, my Lesbia, and let us love, and let us value the rumors of all the severe old women less than a penny.

Catullus, Carmen V, lines 1-4, circa 50 B.C.E. (poor translation my own)

(We don’t know why the severe old women didn’t like Catullus’s girlfriend; some critics speculate she was a slave or a servant girl.)

And my favorite response to all the busybodies who somehow think that what two people do in private is somehow threatening to them, John Donne’s famous “Get a life and stay out of mine!” poem:

THE CANONIZATION.

by John Donne

FOR God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love ;

Or chide my palsy, or my gout ;

My five gray hairs, or ruin’d fortune flout ;

With wealth your state, your mind with arts improve ;

Take you a course, get you a place,

Observe his Honour, or his Grace ;

Or the king’s real, or his stamp’d face

Contemplate ; what you will, approve,

So you will let me love.

Alas ! alas ! who’s injured by my love?

What merchant’s ships have my sighs drown’d?

Who says my tears have overflow’d his ground?

When did my colds a forward spring remove?

When did the heats which my veins fill

Add one more to the plaguy bill?

Soldiers find wars, and lawyers find out still

Litigious men, which quarrels move,

Though she and I do love.

Call’s what you will, we are made such by love ;

Call her one, me another fly,

We’re tapers too, and at our own cost die,

And we in us find th’ eagle and the dove.

The phoenix riddle hath more wit

By us ; we two being one, are it ;

So, to one neutral thing both sexes fit.

We die and rise the same, and prove

Mysterious by this love.

We can die by it, if not live by love,

And if unfit for tomb or hearse

Our legend be, it will be fit for verse ;

And if no piece of chronicle we prove,

We’ll build in sonnets pretty rooms ;

As well a well-wrought urn becomes

The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs,

And by these hymns, all shall approve

Us canonized for love ;

And thus invoke us, “You, whom reverend love

Made one another’s hermitage ;

You, to whom love was peace, that now is rage ;

Who did the whole world’s soul contract, and drove

Into the glasses of your eyes ;

So made such mirrors, and such spies,

That they did all to you epitomize—

Countries, towns, courts beg from above

A pattern of your love.”

(Source: Donne, John. Poems of John Donne. vol I. E. K. Chambers, ed.

London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1896. 12-13.)

(John Donne was old man who married a much younger woman.)

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