Something Borrowed, Something Blah

Fred Thompson Quizzed On Civil Unions

The link goes to a short story about Fred Thompson getting confused about the state of same-sex marriages and civil unions. Thompson’s campaign supports states’ rights to decide on civil unions and he is against recognizing full faith and credit with respect to same-sex unions.

I’ve intentionally skirted around the political arena up to this point because, well, with politics comes the same-sex marriage debate, and with the same-sex marriage debate comes my utter exhaustion. I don’t think it’s particularly homophobic to not to be up-to-date with the current state of same-sex marriage in the U.S. I, however, think there is some heterosexism in some of the way that the issue is handled in a lot of my interactions. For one, people always assume that I support same-sex marriage. I don’t. I support the right for all people of all sexualities to get married, but I have no intention to get married, nor do I even like the institution as a whole.

I’m thinking, too, that a classmate of mine flashed me her engagement ring the other day and I couldn’t help but feel a little…alienated, maybe? Like, she made a choice to become part of an institution that I cannot be a part of (even though I don’t want to, but whatever) and that is a conscious choice to perpetuate the privileges awarded to heterosexuality. I’m sure she didn’t intend to upset me or anything, and truthfully she didn’t, but I always feel that way when I’m so directly confronted by marriage. It just confounds me how many socially liberal and pro-gay straight people get married, and it’s not like I’m seeing a lot of “bring the institution down from the inside” sort of behavior going on. Maybe if culturally we focused more on the experiences of actual gay people inside and outside of relationships, there would be more interpersonal consideration from straight people on how they may or may not be committing microaggressions in this area.