Cum-passion

(There are a lot of other funny cartoons about this topic here.)

Gay marriage, or the lack there of, is on the mind of every lesbian blogger this week, so I thought I would follow suit and share my thoughts. Let me start with a disclaimer. I am 23 and not currently in love; nor have I ever fallen in love with someone I wanted to share the rest of my life with. I spent the first 21.5 years of my life imbibed in the world of conservative Christianity and "traditionalistic" values and where every thought I had was filtered through a machine of scripture, status quo, and religious domination. I am not naive to the fact that I come to this topic without an intimate understanding of what it feels like to want to commit your life to someone else and that I haven't thoroughly broken all the ties to my religious thought process. I, without hesitation, confess that my thoughts on this issue are undeveloped and fragmentary, but I'm going to throw my lesbian blog into the gay marriage ring anyways. ("Gay Marriage Ring"... that would be a fantastic before and after puzzle on Wheel of Fortune.)

I am currently studying journalism and I constantly have my head in a book, which means that the majority of my life revolves around words. I love words. (That's an awkward statement, but it's true.) Words are reliable, they’re personal, they have history, and they have a lot of power. Words can be goofy, words can offend, words can uplift, words can turn people on; and the same word can evoke all of those emotions, plus many more. The one thing that I have learned about words is that words have very little to do with the definition that has been attached to them. I am always shocked when I open a thesaurus* and see that so many words, for all intensive purposes, mean the exact same thing. Why so many words? It is because words have two parts. There is the definition part of a word. This is the way a word functions in a sentence; the definitive … you know, that's how we get the word "definition" … the definitive properties of a word give it meaning.

However; far more important than the definition of a word is the connotation that any word brings along with it. The idea of a word, what a word represents, is considerably more influential than its actual meaning. When you hear a word, you see a picture. That picture is not of a page in a dictionary; it is of a scenario or a feeling or an experience. This is what makes words so powerful. Everything that you have been through, everything that you have felt, everything that you have experienced is rooted inside of you and can be brought to the surface at any moment with any word. The power of a word lies not in it's definition, but in what that word represents.



The fight over same-sex rights, at this moment, revolves around a word and how that word is defined. Opponents to same-sex marriage believe that the word should be re-defined to specify that the union is between a man and a woman. Both sides of the issue have thrown the word "marriage" into the ring as our scapegoat, as a vehicle for contention, but I don't think that we are actually battling over a definition. The proponents of same-sex marriage aren't fighting over a word, we are fighting over what that word represents. Ultimately, if you believe that the union between a man and woman is different than the union between a woman and woman, then you believe that homosexual love is different than heterosexual love. That is the connotation that we are fighting against.

Here is the thing. Congress has control over words. Politicians and religious bodies have the definitive authority to define anything and everything. I say, let them fuck the shit out of definitions; until their toes curl, their checks turn rosy, and they're out of breath. Because nobody can define what you come home to everyday. Nobody can tell you what you have. If you love somebody with more love than you thought you had in you; if you come home to somebody that you have, in your heart, committed to spend the rest of your life to; if you have somebody that you fight with and laugh with and fuck with and sit with, then you have a marriage. You have all the connotations of marriage , even if you don't have that word...yet.

Because this fight over same-sex marriage revolves so much around fear, I don't particularly think that throwing our fists in the air and stomping our feet through the crowds is the way to bring about understanding. I think that there is room here for compassion; not much, but a little bit. I remember feeling scared when I went through the process of identifying my sexual feelings. There was a lot of fear in my life at that time and I got through it because I showed myself a little bit of compassion. Fear is fear; whether it's me being scared to admit that I wanted to fall in love with a girl or if it's a religious group in Idaho being scared of the change in status quo. I think that compassion is our road to progress because compassion brings about trust and trust reduces fear.

Compassion isn't easy in these times, so let me give you some advice. I recently read an article about the correlation between compassion and oxytocin. The research suggests that the more oxytocin your body naturally produces, the more compassionate you feel towards others. In case you didn't know, oxytocin is the hormone that is released during an orgasm. The more orgasms you have, the more compassionate you can be. So fuck away ladies! because if the road to gay marriage is compassion, one of the on-ramps includes gay sex. Now, that's something I can get down with.

P.S. Alternative titles to this blog included "Blind Eye for the Queer Guys" or "Fight...for Your Right...to Maaaaaarry (to the tune of the Beastie Boys)"

*I do not and can not in good conscious advise anyone to use a thesaurus. Stephen King once said, "Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule." and I agree with him.