Op-Ed: Daring to say 'I Don't' to Gay Marriage

I've been reading and posting in various places a lot about the euphemistic "marriage equality" fight, debate, debacle--whatever you want to call it. This single-issue gay marriage agenda does not serve the queer community well--or at all. We have major life issues to tackle: healthcare, secure jobs, food and shelter...you know, the basics. Marriage is a luxury only financially privileged LGBT people and their desperate followers can afford.

Apparently the price tag for the fight to win gay marriage referendums around the country this year has been 100 million dollars, or at least that's the number that's been thrown around in recent days. This is insanity! I want to know who is collecting that money, where it is going and why? Who is in fact capitalizing on "marriage equality" because it sure ain't anyone I know, even those of my queer friends and acquaintances who want to get married.

There have been a few choice articles about the subject I would like to bring to attention. This roundtable piece by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore puts the anti-assimilationist position in perspective. It's the same position taken by radical feminists, queers, liberationists and abolitionists of yesteryear, most of whom have apparently abandoned the ship because it's easier to be a blowhard that work hard for change.

Dismantling the prison-corporate-industrial complex, tear it down-completely, was the mantra in the good old days of revolution and movements for social justice. Agitate for real change, not reform of bad systems. Start over. New beginnings, not renovation of old, unsound institutions. For, as lesbian warrior-poet Audre Lorde wrote, "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house."

On another note, Queerty.com had the audacity to declare that LGBT people wanting to marry contribute more to society than queers who don't want to marry and single everybodies. Queerty's analysis of a study reporting that married gays are much like married straight people was horrifying, and study was just plain creepy. As in, the main thrust of marriage-minded lesbian and gay folk is the ol' we-are-just-like-them blather. It sounds to me like the teachers in the "Peanuts" cartoons, Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah.

White noise, ugly sounds, stuff we should never have to hear. Because we-are-NOT-just-like...everyone or anyone else.