A topical play

A couple of my friends and a number of other people who would probably be friends if I’d ever met them open tonight in a play called ‘8.’ I understand it deals with the overturning of Prop 8 in California which was designed to deny gay couples the right to marry.

I wish I could see the play. Heck, I wish I could have been in it. Because this is one of the singularly important issues being decided in the country as I type.

Mary and I attended a wedding a couple of weeks ago that would not have been legally sanctioned a year ago. And the couple could not have held the ceremony in Texas where they live, because it will be some time before it’s legal there.

Rest assured, it will be. Legal in Texas, that is. And in the other states that have yet to bow to logic and right thinking and practicality and simple social equity. Because no sane person will ultimately accept the argument that any identifiable subset of ‘us’ can reasonably be denied the rights and benefits that others enjoy on the basis of such specious arguments as have been mouthed by the religious right in the case at hand.

Even in the holdout states, there will come a time when a couple married elsewhere sues for their civil rights and when the thing makes it to the Supremes – assuming the ultra right religionists haven’t stacked the court at the moment in question – they’re going to lose against the overwhelming weight of ‘full faith and credit.’ Oh, they’ll piss and moan about states’ rights and the religious foundation of this country (really?) but you don’t need to be a constitutional law prof to understand that this dog just won’t hunt.

They’re gonna lose. And in doing so, they’re gonna win and win big. Just as the South ultimately won (although in many parts of the South they still don’t embrace their good fortune) when the Supremes decided the cases that came to be known collectively as Brown v Board of Education of Topeka, KS and Southern states gradually and grudgingly expanded their educational enterprise to include the rich resource represented in the young black minds that had formerly been relegated to day work and hard labor.

So Mary and I went to a dear friend’s ‘gay’ wedding and guess what? It felt like any other wedding. The only thing special about it was that it was friends getting married. And this from a guy who knows weddings, having sung for literally scores of them back in the day.

Anyway, this threatens to become a diatribe and really I started with the intention of simply congratulating Larry and Sindy and their buds on a timely theatrical presentation that I hope will come to be considered mainstream in the near term.