Of Meteorites and Marriage
Considering humanity's possible calamities, marriage-equality shouldn't make anyone's list
About 20 days ago, a blazing meteorite tore through our atmosphere and exploded over Russia. This was a minor rock, relatively speaking, didn’t even see it coming. We had our eyes on ”DA14,” the much bigger threat that happened to be flying by on the same day and which could’ve inflicted vastly more damage than its little unnamed cousin did. Still, with about a thousand injuries, I don’t think I would find the former at all minor if I’d spent Feb. 15 in a Russian clinic having the glass of a blown-out window extracted from my flesh.
Looking in the other direction, about 20 days forward to March 26, that’s the date for opening arguments in Hollingsworth v. Perry, the case challenging California’s law against marriage equality. The National Organization for Marriage is marking the occasion – along with the usual suspects – with the March for Marriage.
Comparing both points on this timeline, one can’t help but think of the absurdly misplaced attention of these folks. These are godly people. If falling skies aren’t a celestial poke that their priorities are woefully out of whack, what is?
If I try to imagine the perspective of someone who last month had to at least contemplate our insignificance in the cosmos and the fact that material is hurtling around that same cosmos and could smash into us just as easily as did the Russian rock, yet this is where they choose to focus their energies, I am stumped.
Almost anything is more important than blocking marriage equality. I can understand why marriage is important for those of us trying to get it. But those against? Seriously, what gives?
I have considered that this is a religious war for you. You may believe this is what God expects of you. Somehow, of all the injustice in the world, of all the pain and suffering, of the hunger, the disease, the poverty and misery, this is where you believe you are being called to direct your attention.
”Just one of many righteous battles,” you may counter. ”I can chew gum and block equality at the same time.”
I still can’t believe you don’t think that you have something better to do. I know you must have something better to do, and I don’t even know you. But I can look around and it’s obvious that you are fighting windmills. Granting that faith is what it is, I’d suggest you pray against marriage equality. I don’t mind that. I’d say the same to someone looking at a house on fire and praying for all the inhabitants to be rescued, for the fire to be extinguished. By all means, pray for that. But don’t get on your knees and start that prayer circle in everybody’s way. Don’t get between the house and the hoses. Your God is an awesome God who shouldn’t care that you’re not blocking the way. So just pray, righteously as all get out – over there, out of the way.
This is about the extent of my pity, however. You have a fixation that strikes me as entirely unhealthy. In my scant reading of holy texts, seems to me that God, in whatever form he or she takes for you, won’t throw many divine points your way for trying to block marriage equality when you could be doing something useful – healing the sick, helping the poor, feeding the hungry possibly.
But meteorites and asteroids and injured inhabitants of the Urals remind me of how fragile our existence is, how we are all one species that I would like to see continue past the point the dinosaurs got to. It’s enough to compel me to take a moment and implore you, ”Get a life.” I’m only going to take the moment, however, because I already have one.
Will O’Bryan is Metro Weekly‘s managing editor. Reach him at wobryan@MetroWeekly.com.
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