By Cokie & Steven Roberts
United Media
We’re “hosting a local celebration,” said the invitation, for two couples getting married this summer. The hosts didn’t bother to mention that one of the couples, Kevin and Grant, are gay.
This is one small sign of a large social trend. More gay couples are forming committed relationships, and for a simple reason. Wanting a partner, a soul mate, to share one’s life is the most elemental of human emotions.
Many of these couples would like to get married. Some of that impulse is practical -- merging tax returns or sharing health benefits. But the deeper motive is psychological -- making a public promise, to the world and to each other.
As Kevin told us: “Each of us has found what most people spend a lifetime looking for -- the one person who knows us better than any other, the person who will sacrifice for the other, the person who will care for and protect the other.” Adds Grant: “Marriage is about creating family. Kevin will be my family after July 8th.”
Ironically, the invitation to the wedding party (the actual ceremony will be in Canada, where gay marriage is legal) came just as the Senate was debating and rejecting a Constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. “Marriage is under attack,” thundered Sen. Bill Frist, the majority leader, and he has a point (think of the disposable men in “Sex and the City” and the disposable women of “The Sopranos”). But it’s not under attack from the likes of Kevin and Grant. In fact, the precise opposite is true.
These young men embody all the values of tradition and tenacity that foes of gay marriage say they believe in. The whole idea that they endanger the institution of matrimony by wanting to join it is absurd. And they are hardly unusual.
As reader Stephanie Thomas wrote to the Los Angeles Times: “According to President Bush, I’m a threat to society. I live in Burbank with my partner and our two girls. We are employed, pay taxes, vote and, besides a random parking ticket, obey the law. ... We even have two dogs. ... So who and what is the real threat? Trust me, we’re boring.”
