Amanda Weeps
August 21, 2010
HERE is the main part of a letter to the editor of The New York Times this week regarding a piece by Ross Douthat in which he argued that heterosexual marriage is a worthy ideal:
Ideals may be hard to argue with, but they have real-world consequences, and even a beautiful vision of marriage as an abstract ideal becomes ugly when it excludes actual human beings and damages their well-being. Ideas don’t ache, institutions don’t suffer and symbols don’t sob, but real people do.
By Mr. Douthat’s logic, the love, commitment and sacrifice that my partner and I share and practice (13 years so far) count for nothing compared with a particular ideal about what should be true. For that matter, our rights don’t count either. That’s not an ideal that we, or many people in this country, can get behind.
Amanda Udis-Kessler
Denver
Amanda Udis-Kessler is, I presume, this Amanda Udis-Kessler, who received a doctorate in sociology from the Jesuit school, Boston College, and is on her way to becoming a Unitarian minister. Notice the smile on Amanda’s face. This does not look like a woman who aches, suffers and sobs. You might compare her smile with the expression you might expect to see on the face of a teenage boy growing up with two lesbian “mothers,” two women who believe that not a single male in the entire world is worthy of marrying.
To Amanda, heterosexual marriage is not just a flawed ideal, but an “ugly” one. It is hateful. It fails to officially recognize homosexual unions and thus actually damages the “well-being” of homosexuals. In what way does it hurt well-being? The only possible answer is that it damages a homosexual’s pride. What else could it be? After all, no law can prevent Amanda from loving whomever she wishes. The denial of shared medical insurance wouldn’t make a person ache, suffer and sob. This pride, in Amanda’s eyes, is a matter of “well-being.” But why should it be? Why sob? This Amanda does not explain. Most people get over wounds to their pride. For instance, when a heterosexual wants to marry someone and that person rejects him, he eventually recovers. People ache, suffer and sob all the time because they cannot marry the person they want and their pain is much worse than Amanda’s. After all, Amanda lives with the person she loves.
Amanda mentions her “sacrifice,” but does not specify. What sacrifice? What does a woman sacrifice by living with another woman for 13 years? Space in her bed? Fun with another woman?
Amanda believes the love she has for a woman “count(s) for nothing” because she cannot marry her lover. Amanda cannot marry her mother and she cannot marry a niece or nephew, does that mean these forms of love “count for nothing” in the eyes of the law? By the mere mention of the word ‘love,’ Amanda perhaps assumes she will command the sympathies of all but the heartless. But all love is exclusive. By loving a woman, Amanda has refused love to a man. Isn’t it “ugly” to believe all men unworthy of love? Don’t men have the “right” to wives? Don’t her parents have the “right” to grandchildren and a son-in-law?
Amanda must, of course, mention the word “rights” so that she can implictly equate her inability to marry a woman with the denial of civil rights to blacks. But no civil right is denied to Amanda. She has the same rights to marry as any heterosexual. She simply must marry someone of the opposite sex. I am not denied the right to drive because I am required to stop at red lights. Amanda’s argument is similar to the claim that someone who wants to go through red lights and is not legally permitted to do this is denied the right to drive. The truth is, Amanda is not denied any rights but only the possibility to be free of wounded pride. The purpose of legalizing same-sex marriage is not to grant something positive, a right to marry, but to salve the wounded pride of millions of Amandas, who smile through their tears.
I am trying to imagine how difficult it must be to live with this constant sense of outraged entitlement. No one has broken into Amanda’s home and told her she cannot love her girlfriend. No one has denied her a job or a place at a lunch counter. And, yet she aches, suffers and sobs.
— Comments —
Brandon Boyle writes:
The push to mainstream homosexual “marriage” is a complete excercise in narcissism, as well as an effort to force societal acceptance of the homosexual way of life. This in turn would, at least superficially, assuage the alienated pain that comes from the latent knowledge that one is living an intrinsically disordered lifestyle. It’s similar to how liberalism seeks to erase its opponents’ voice from existence, because their very dissent threatens to expose the chimera for what it is.
It’s interesting that this woman believes the love that she and her partner share counts for nothing without marriage. If that’s the case it must not of meant much to begin with. Love must stand on a foundation of Truth, and accordingly, moral goodness. That which does not can persist by calling itself ‘love’ for awhile but will ultimately prove to be bankrupt and disordered. I’ve noticed that the word love is thrown around casually today by many people. It’s meaning is usually this: Mutual respect of the self centered satisfaction of each other’s whims and desires. That is what “love” means in the modern context defined by liberalism. Homosexuals tend to use the word often, mostly to garner sympathy. But they seem to confuse the word love with their sexual proclivites quite often as if the two are inseparable. This is telling. So, the question remains, do homosexuals really experience Love? Or are their relationships mostly centered on mutual affirmation of intrinsic disorder as well as a perceived safe haven from the attendant confusion?
On a related note, I have always been struck by the overt “masculinity” of so many lesbians. For instance, this past June, my girlfriend and I visited her extended family in South Dakota. While there, we visited the Badlands, a national park based around interesting rock formations. In the visitor’s parking lots we encountered two very masculine lesbians holding hands who from a distance we thought were two young men. This causes me to ruminate: Why do those who claim to be attracted sexually to their own sex make such an effort to physically appear the opposite?
Laura writes:
The radical individualist finds it hard to love when it offers no personal satisfaction. I notice this often when talking to liberals about their relatives. All people find some relatives annoying. But a liberal is more inclined to see an annoying relative as completely unworthy of love or attention. The troublesome person doesn’t fit into the liberal’s scheme of love, which always involves some immediate reward. A conservative, on the other hand, is more inclined to love someone in part because that person is part of their world whether they want them to be or not. He is more equipped by his worldview to love actual persons, rather than the experience of love. Love is, in part, a shared passage through time. A liberal divorces when a spouse no longer gratifies him in any way or is not affectionate in return. Love doesn’t exist unless it feels good.
On Brandon’s last point, some homosexuals obviously identify with the opposite sex and may have possessed traits of the opposite sex since early in life. This confused identity adds to the attraction of the same sex. The desire for the same sex is obviously strong and sometimes overwhelming in these individuals. Not all of those who are living as homosexuals “make an effort” to appear as the opposite sex. They may need to make an effort to appear as their own sex. Of course, some obviously do make an effort to look like the opposite sex.
Brendan writes:
The push for homosexual marriage, draped as it is in the rhetoric of “rights”, is not at all about that. These “rights” are available in most states on the basis of a system of contracts. The push for same sex marriage is about using the courts and the law to force social change — they are trying to force acceptance of their lifestyle as being equivalent to that of heterosexual couples.
How so? The scenario to consider is that growing numbers of lesbian (and it’s mostly lesbians who are marrying, not gay men) couples will be showing up in the family-oriented suburbs and wanting to participate fully, with their own children, in the life of these communities — having your kids over there for play dates, showing up at your kids’ birthday parties with their partners, advancing their agenda on the PTA and the school board and so on. And the straight folks who don’t like this, don’t approve, and want to keep their kids away from it will be relentlessly socially shamed as being “bigots who won’t accept the law of the land, just like the racist bigots who didn’t accept interracial marriage in the 60s and 70s”. The homosexual marriage laws will be used as bludgeons to force suburban heterosexual couples to accept homosexual couples into their communities and into the lives of their kids, under the penalty of extensive social shaming if they refuse. Plain and simple this is the entire point of forcing same sex marriage on the country — to make everyone accept homosexual relationships as being equally legitimate as heterosexual ones. I can assure you that it is this acceptance that Amanda wants, not anything else. And if she has to force it down your throat, she’ll do it, too.
