Dateland: A Piglet and a Duckling Walk Into a Wedding Chapel…

I’m writing this a couple of days after the Supreme Court torpedoed DOMA and Prop 8. I’ve been struttin’ down the street, feeling extra sassy, and giving the Hurray-For-Us Wink and Nod™ to anyone who looks remotely gay. But then something terrible happened.

Throughout the marriage fight, I’ve focused solely on our side of the argument.  Marriage will give us more than 1,000 new rights! We’ll be able to sit at the adult table at Thanksgiving rather than be relegated to the kid/freak table in the basement. Fred Phelps’ head will explode and rain us all in delicious chocolate sprinkles.

This was promising news! And I was 100% behind the effort because I didn’t see a downside.

I even surveyed my straight friends. I asked how gay marriage would affect them and compiled their top responses:

a.)   I don’t care. But let’s open another bottle of wine and discuss how terrible MY marriage is.

b.)  I don’t care. But you should know that marriage will kill your sex life.

c.)   I don’t care. But do the gays realize that marriage is hard work, and you have to deal with inlaws? Good luck with that! And if you have kids, you have to go to soccer games. In the rain. And act like you give a damn if the kid scores a goal. And you’ll need to move to the suburbs, because that’s where married people live. God, I’m so depressed. Let’s open another bottle of wine.

But I ignored all of this because we’re gay! We’ll do marriage right! It will be like a Cole Porter song! Clever, sexy, and always welcome at any piano bar. Our marriages will be rolled in enough confetti to buffer us from middle-age malaise, and our liberal views on vagaries of physical desire will allow us to weather any niggling indiscretions with aplomb. There will be no frying pans smashed over heads. Only champagne corks popping and glasses clinking.

It sounded so great! But then the terrible thing happened.

A day after the Supreme Court decisions were issued, a friend forwarded me an email from some right-wing wacko group. It was a picture of a duckling making out with a piglet, with a caption that read: “Is this the next thing that will be legal in the U.S.?”

My first reaction was to chuckle at the image of the piglet and duckling in love, and say, “Ah, kids today!” Because I have no issue with interspecies romance. I’d marry my dog if it were legal.

Or would I?

As I stared at the cute picture, the word “legal” jumped out of the caption in stark relief. “Legal,” I muttered to myself. “That means it’s a law. A rule. And I don’t like rules. Oh, no!” I refuse to follow laws. Even the laws of physics. In the privacy of my own house, there is no gravity and water is allowed to boil at whatever temperature it damn well pleases. And I won’t even get into what I’ve done to skirt Newton’s Third Law of Thermodynamics.

I looked up in horror from the image of the piglet and duckling. “Did you realize that this marriage thing is a law?” I asked my beloved.

She sighed. “I was hoping to keep that from you.” Then, after some grumbling about how right-wing imbeciles always manage to ruin our fun, she made me focus on the cute picture rather than the caption. “Don’t fret. We’ll take this law and bend it so that it’s just as outlandish and adorable as this picture.”

 “OK, but I get to be the piglet.”