Tuesday, October 28, 2008

In Sickness and In Health, but Mostly In Sickness

I wanted to do something interesting or profound or maybe even angry for Write to Marry Day, but the fact is, both Darkrose and I are sick. I've been sick for about a week and a half; I got better over the weekend but now my voice is starting to go. Darkrose actually took the day off and slept for most of it.

My own sleep cycle is screwed up so I stayed up all night. I did a load of laundry around noon--we were getting to the "honey, I'm running out of underwear" stage--and made up a batch of lentil soup. At some point, I cleaned out the cat boxes and washed some dishes. About the time she crawled out bed, I fell into it and slept for a while.

It's just coming up on 9pm; normally at this time, she'd be getting ready to leave work, but tonight she's on the phone with a friend whose been having some spam problems on her website's forum. I put down my book--Lies My Teacher Told Me, which will probably be my 12th Cannonball Read book unless I pause to read the first Mercy Thompson book--to do this post, but I'm actually hoping to fall back asleep soon.

Ogdred, our younger cat, is curled up at the foot of the bed and Joxur, the older one, is trying to convince me that because I fed him gooshy food earlier than usual, he should get more at the appointed time. The house is kind of a wreck because I'm not the best housekeeper when I'm well, let alone when I'm sick.

This is our life slowed down a little thanks to the first flu of the fall. This is the "in sickness" part of our marriage. This is our dangerous "glamorous" lesbian lifestyle. This is our GLBT agenda; helping out a friend, making dinner, having clean underwear in the house, dealing with cats, doing our best to take care of one another when we're both coughing and sneezing and constantly blowing our noses.

This is what people are afraid of. Oh sure, the leather boys (and bois) posing half-naked on Pride Parade floats and the Dykes on Bikes are scary; they're the mysterious other. But we're pretty damn normal; we struggle through the petty daily challenges pretty much like I did when my spouse was male. We're not just like the couple next door, we ARE the couple next door.

Hatred is complicated and multi-layered and sometimes it's a lot of work to maintain. When the homophobes and the anti-same-sex marriage crowd are faced with the fact that the people they're hating on are just another couple trying to make it through the week, it's freaky for them. How are they different? How can they be better than us if they are us and we are them?

What if they're wrong? What if they've been wrong all this time? What if this means they've been wrong about other things?

We are the married couple next door and, aside from how we have sex, we are far more like a straight couple than not. When you vote, ask yourself how a pair of people who love each other and who make late night runs to the store in order to buy ice cream for the other could possibly threaten this state so much that our constitution needs to be amended to remove our rights. And then?

Vote No on Proposition 8.

And now? I'm gonna go have some soup.

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