Nyah nyah nyah-nyah nyah! I can get married!

Not that I wasn’t going to anyway. But

I almost used the blink tag there, I’m so excited.

You know, I’m one of those survivors who basically never cries. Sometimes out of extreme frustration, but that’s about it except when I was little. The last time I can remember crying in front of my parents is when they (the senate or whoever, not my parents) passed the “Defense” of Marriage Act in 1996, letting states ban same-sex marriage at will and outlawing it nationally. And today I cried out of happiness, instead.
Also, the first picture I saw for the story on the SFGate site is of Shelly Bailes and Ellen Pontac, who I totally know. They started the gay pride picnic in Davis, where I grew up. They make ties, too, or at least they used to. I met them and found out about the first picnic at a Whole Earth Festival more than 10 years ago when I stopped to buy a tie with stars and planets all over it. Not only is that a huge shout-out, but I just went to the Whole Earth Festival again this last weekend! In fact, I want to blog about it later….

This is a huge deal, y’all. And it makes our coast look a lot better. I was afraid that it was going to be all Massachussetts and Vermont and everyone. The left coast started it, damnit! Hawaii was the first fighter on the marriage front!

It’s deeply relevant to this blog, too, because I can’t think of anything more stupidly codependent or bad-boundaries than telling people that they can’t get married because you (or vice versa) have decided it’s morally wrong. Or gross. Or whatever it may be. Because people feel threatened by it for their own very personal reasons.

My girlfriend’s sister gives us great examples of this. She likes to write these letters about how she (girlfriend, not sister) is going to hell for her “tendency” toward this “sin” of being with a chick. And how it makes EVERYONE ELSE really uncomfortable, and how she is alienating God (yeah, because THAT’S how that works. If you can alienate your higher power, are you sure you really have one?) and how she isn’t happy (projection) and how she needs to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

Which is routinely hilarious, because I literally can’t think of anyone who has a closer or more personal relationship with their higher power, whatever name they may give it at any given time, than Annie. And because she, of course, is happier in recovery from the abuse they grew up with than she has ever been, grows happier and healthier and more deeply rooted and deeply herself every day. And then there’s her sister, who is still suffering from the effects of the abuse they grew up with, and the crazy and conflicted beliefs of the cult that they grew up in – and is acting that out by projecting onto her sister and the rest of her family, and trying to control how everyone lives and what they believe.

It’s a microcosm of the political battlefield on which this stuff gets played out. Handing out legal safety and economic safety and benefits to only certain people, and then drumming up crazy reasons to deny it to others, is… well, it’s nuts. It’s a form of abuse, obviously, (probably economic abuse among other things), and it’s fascinating to watch the kinds of projection and unreality that people spout out in trying to defend it. I’m just happy to be able to watch all that from the SAFE side now.