Yes, really.

In light of recent news (US 9th Cir PERRY v. BROWN) there are a lot of arguments going on.   Could we please request one simple thing out of all of it?

Stop calling it gay.





Up until fairly recently, the basic construct for getting married and being married and being called married was simple.    If you were of one sex and wanted to marry another of the opposite sex, easy.  Or depending on when and where and why, at least the same limited number of choices available to everyone equally, with certain qualifications.   There are always qualifications, even if it's as simple as the resident tea leaf reader or elder agreeing to perform the ritual.

Generically speaking, all two people needed to be was opposite-sex, sane, healthy to a certain extent, not "closely" related, not in circumstances precluding marriage (such as perhaps being incarcerated, living in conflicting jurisdictions, prohibited by some law in some given country) and lastly being of the age of majority in the jurisdiction the two wished to be married within..    Of course there might be other considerations aside from legal ones, such as a religion refusing to marry one person to someone of another faith, the people not having the economic funds available for whatever paperwork might be involved, or the lacking of certain documentation.    The bottom line is that if you were "marriageable" (adult, sane,  healthy, etc) you could get married to another meeting the same qualifications and eligibility as you met.

There is a rather spurious but certainly true fact that for a given marriageable person, that marriageable  person was not and has never been precluded from getting married as long as they held that marriageable status.   They were perfectly free to marry.anyone they wished -- they were not being denied the right / privilege of  getting married.   Now the spurious part is that there's a condition, the other had to be of the opposite sex.     So two homosexuals could certainly get married; just not to each other.    Unless the two homosexuals in question were a gay man and a lesbian woman; then they could indeed get married.  Yet while nobody meeting the other qualifications was being denied the right / privilege of  being married, some were certainly being restricted in their ability to choose who the other person was going to be, one based upon biological sex.    


This might could lead down the road to an entirely specious argument about comparing other prohibited types of marriage for a given person (more than one other person, relatives, animals, children, the insane, detached body parts, plants,  invisible people, buildings, cars) to being homosexual.    Clearly liking another adult that is one's own sex  in a romantic way is in no way the same as being a polygamist or loving inanimate objects, so let's just toss out that entire line of reasoning and stick to defining that in this case, we are referring to two healthy adult human beings.   And no, "But I love my sister!"doesn't count.


Given the above, when all is said and done,  there is nothing stopping gay people from getting married.   Just that there is something stopping gay people of the same-sex from getting married to each other.   However, this is not gay marriage and calling it such is an insult to everyone involved and not.   Because homosexual or not isn't the issue or the restriction.  It's only that a pair be of opposite sexes.   None of sexual preference, gender orientation, clothing choice or physical status is even a consideration.  


When discussing "traditional" marriage, within various historical moral population matters or not, supposedly the state  has (the people have) an interest in managing (for economic and social and health and other purposes) who can be married and who can't.     Supposedly religions have similar interests, and often the two are combined; the state issues a license and the religion performs the ceremony.    There are places where these two are the same entity, and others where things are entirely done on the civil side with no ceremony performed at all  or religious side where there is no paperwork used.    Those are all outside of the scope here, and are different discussions.    The only consideration here that will be stipulated for the purpose of discussion, is that such a marriage involves an opposite-sex couple, which are two legally of age adult sane mentally-sound humans not related by blood.

There is generally no requirement that an opposite-sex couple to be married has to have dated, will live  together, likes each other, plans to or has children, has sexual intercourse, shares anything in common or even has ever met.       In general, one could say they just have to each want to get married to the other.  Not prove why.

There there's no difference in a same-sex couple if we're talking about equality.   They do not have to be gay; in fact, it would be unfair and exclusive and bigoted to require them to.    Jane and Tom don't need to be in love or plan to have relations or have any children to get married.    Why would Jane and Joan or Tom and Tim need to have any of the other stipulations either?    If an 18 year-old woman wants to marry an 80 year-old man (and vice versa) and all they do is file the paperwork and nothing else, they are just as married as the two 24 year-olds in love and wanting a house and 5 children together.  The same goes if the two are man/woman, man/man, or woman/woman

It's so not gay.