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Still Proud To Be In S.F. Who cares if 4,000 gay marriages went down in CA Supreme Court flames? The gauntlet has been thrown

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, August 18, 2004

Everyone saw it coming.

No one in his/her right mind truly believed that San Francisco's landmark same-sex marriages would stand the test of the scowling California Supreme Court or the white-hot glare of the rabid homophobic war-drunk BushCo Right. It was almost no contest, a leather-clad dove versus an archaic, oily tank from the word go -- or, rather, from the words "I do."

It was a given. Everyone pretty much expected that the intense sweep of love and hope that flooded the City last spring would almost immediately suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous legislation and gnarled conservative sexual dread, and, truth be told, everyone was actually rather stunned that the nuptials lasted as long as they did and that they caused such an enormous national uproar and that the country responded with a dazzling outpouring of deep feeling and flowers and it's about goddamn time.

But lo, the state Supreme Court did what it was hired to do: Wield the sharp sword of bitter, outdated, biased justice, declare Mayor Gavin Newsom's still-astounding initiative out of legal bounds and pronounce all those beautiful marriages, all that astounding love, all that wondrous feeling null and void.

And all the right-wing homophobes and conservative wonks said, ha ha, snicker. And all the liberals and S.F. denizens and same-sex marriage proponents went, sigh. And then, shrug.
Because anyone who was really paying attention also understands this: The court's decision does not really matter. The right-wing sneers and I-told-you-so's do not really matter. The hateful backlash against gays and progressive notions of love does not matter.

Here's why: The die has been cast. The gauntlet has been thrown down. The wheels are in motion. The sea change is under way. The strap-on has been, well, strapped on.
And while it is indeed terribly sad and disheartening that all those who emerged from S.F.'s City Hall last February with a glow in their eyes and a spring in their newly married step are now feeling more than a little dejected and smacked down and dispossessed, the fact is that these couples were, as most of them fully realized, martyrs to a cause.

They knew this would probably happen. They knew they were walking straight into the line of homophobic fire, and did so with open eyes and open minds and even more open hearts. They were the vanguard, the committed ones, the calm, sacrificial offerings on the altar of painful national change.

This is the way it had to be. Someone had to do it, after all; someone had to be the divine wrench hurled into the wheels of uptight American dogma and Christian self-righteousness, and the thousands of couples married here were brave enough to make that leap and tie that knot and to hell with the judges and the lawmakers who try to untie it again. It's too late. Some knots are simply not meant to be messed with.

Oh sure, the state and the nation can now backpedal like mad, remove the legality of those marriages, strip away the official declarations and tear up all the documents. Have at it. But they can't touch the newly minted universal law. They cannot touch the deeper change; they have no jurisdiction over the spiritual shift, the energetic bonds, that have taken place. That stuff is permanent, baby.

Look, you cannot get dunked in a river and pretend you didn't get wet. You cannot get the bright red lipstick of progress on your cultural shirt collar and then deny the whole affair. The nation has supped the wine of divine love-drunk revolution, and there is no sobering up.
Swallow this, America: Same-sex marriage is now a pressing and urgent and heartfelt issue, one that is virtually guaranteed to become a foregone conclusion in our generation.

Yes, that's right. Legal, happy, stable same-sex marriages are just a matter of time. They are just a matter of perspectival torque. They are just a matter of knocking the yellowed teeth out of our leader's small-minded ideologies and draining the bile from the sexually terrified and the morally indignant and the tragically ignorant.

Proof? Try this:

"Punishment for marriage: If any white person intermarry with a colored person, or any colored person intermarry with a white person, he shall be guilty of a felony and shall be punished by confinement in the penitentiary for not less than one nor more than five years."

Isn't that sweet? Remember that law? It wasn't all that long ago (1958, to be exact) that this very line, this nasty little bit of legalized hate, was on the books in Virginia. Newsom himself pointed it out during his wonderful, articulate and heartfelt press conference just after the court's ruling came down in San Francisco. Yes, interracial marriages were illegal in many states as recently as 50 years ago.

And guess what? When the now-famous Loving v. Virginia case was in the national spotlight in 1967, polls showed that a whopping 94 percent of white America opposed such marriages.
And the right wingers and the Bible thumpers were screaming and raving then, too, absolutely horrified -- horrified! -- at the thought of blacks marrying whites, given how they were absolutely sure such unions were a slippery slope (always, always a slippery slope) toward ungodly debauchery, and polygamy, and pedophilia, inbreeding, genital warts, hysterical blindness, murder, rape, bunions, floods and locusts and loud mufflers and the imminent advent of rap metal.

And just look. Weren't they so right? Didn't the world just collapse and rivers of blood gush through the streets as the God-given sanctity of smug white-ass 50-percent-divorce-rate marriage just come to a screeching screaming hell-pricked halt the moment the first white woman married a black man? Oh my God, it sure did! Oh wait.

The California court's slap is only a minor setback. Just wait. Wait maybe one little decade, give or take, right until the crusty aging homophobes in the U.S. Senate begin to die off and the gay rights movement gains even more luscious steam and more Republicans come out of the closet.
Wait right until increasing numbers of Americans realize, as they invariably do, that such change, such openness, such a welcoming of love and evolution is absolutely goddamn mandatory for the health and longevity of any self-respecting nation that claims to be the most free thinking and open minded and self-defined on the planet, even if it's not.

Just wait. It won't be long now. What, you're really going to put a stop to a newly polished facet of true love once it's been discovered? You gonna try to ram through your little state constitutional amendments and stroke your Bible in fear and cover your children's eyes from the hideous image of gay people committing to one another in intimate holy matrimony? Hell, knock yourself out.

The rest of us will be looking back at you from the future, waving good-bye.

posted by Brian at 7:55 PM