GAYS DEFEND MARRIAGE

In the past 20 years, if you heard there was going to be a mass wedding you could usually figure out who was participating if you had two guesses: Moonies or gays and lesbians.

While there were a variety of joint weddings of straight couples here and there, only the Unification Church and the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender community staged events like those at the 1993 and 2000 marches on Washington in which literally thousands of couples exchanged vows.

Other examples include the mass weddings held in San Francisco after that city’s mayor, Gavin Newsom, started illegally handing out marriage licenses on Valentine’s Day 2004, and a mass wedding, concert, and fundraiser for a group of parents of gays and lesbians scheduled for Balboa Park in San Diego this October.

Even if the government recognizes such unions, those taking part in them simply do not understand what marriage is. A wedding is a deeply personal event in which two people join together with a promise to devote their lives to caring for each other. They invite their loved ones to join in support of their specific union. There’s no fundraising, unless you count the loving gifts shared by friends and family to help the new couple get a head start in life.

A wedding is not a political demonstration, and no, a wedding is not a circus.

There’s at least some progress, now that a few LGBT voices have begun to discourage mass weddings, given the unfavorable publicity received by such events in the past. In 2004, openly gay Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) criticized the events in San Francisco as “spectacle weddings” and told the New York Times that “The thing that agitated people were the mass weddings…. It was a mistake in San Francisco compounded by people in Oregon, New Mexico and New York. What it did was provoke a lot of fears.”

After the 2008 California rulings, San Francisco wanted to avoid repeating its mistake. Among rules about looking “normal,” the Mayor’s office told the San Francisco Chronicle they were trying to avoid mass weddings: “The only people who do mass weddings in our culture are Moonies – and they don’t exactly have high poll numbers with the public.”

Note they’re not concerned about being faithful to what marriage means. They just don’t want to hurt the cause with bad publicity and, Heaven forbid, bad poll numbers.

I have never seen an LGBT complaint about mass weddings that pointed out the ignorance of what marriage is supposed to be that is shown by those who plan and participate in such carnivals. Instead, the complaints all focus on what will help convince the country that same-sex couples are “equal.”

I stand by my statement that most of the people fighting to change our country’s marriage laws have no idea what marriage is.

hat tip: GayPatriotWest