"He instinctively can find the shining greatness of our American culture and does a good job of highlighting it (although he also does have those rare lapses when he writes about hockey, but that is something caused by impurities in the Eastern waters or something)." Erik Keilholtz
Under the patronage of St. Tammany
Mark C. N. Sullivan is an editor at a Massachusetts university. He is married and the father of three children. Email
Wednesday, February 04, 2004 Mass. high court rules for gay marriage; civil unions won't do
BOSTON - The Massachusetts high court ruled Wednesday that only full, equal marriage rights for gay couples — rather than civil unions — would be constitutional, erasing any doubts that the nation's first same-sex marriages would take place in the state beginning in mid-May. More from AP
A feature in today's Globe on two lesbians preparing to wed was accompanied by a photo of the engaged couple. At first glance, before reading the caption and accompanying headline, I had taken the "groom" for a man. She certainly resembled one, having apparently made an effort to crop her hair and dress in relatively masculine fashion. It brought to mind a past cable documentary on a male transvestite who took great pains to look like a glamour queen.
Imitation is the greatest form of flattery and all, but aren't lesbian women who endeavor to look as "manly" as possible and gay men who try to fit a "feminine" ideal underscoring the very gender roles they're seeking to overturn? Aren't the Globe fiancées, one traditionally feminine-looking and one butch, acknowledging the binary he-and-she nature of marriage?
Aren't they recognizing that there are some sort of rules – that things are as they are – at the same time they are trying to re-make what is to personal taste? (One thinks of the postmodernists who declare "there is no truth" – as a truth.)
The results are imitation, are caricature, but in the PC world you're not supposed to say it.
Better to maintain a fiction apparent on its face: that a woman and a woman-dressed-as-a-man can be married the same as a woman and man; that a young child doesn't need special and prolonged attention from his or her mother; that the sexes are interchangeable and that a child doesn't benefit any more from a mother and a father than from two mothers or two fathers.
The alternative is to let intuitive reality trump ideology.
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