Michelle Frey is a professional distance runner, and her husband, Jacob, used to be one. This past January they got the idea to organize a 5K run in Minneapolis to raise money and awareness about an organization called Minnesotans United for All Families, which was launched as the coalition to defeat the proposed constitutional amendment in Minnesota that would ban same-sex couples from getting married.
I took my camera along for the run this past Saturday. It was a cool, windy morning, but several thousand enthusiastic runners and supporters showed up for the event that began and ended at the Wilde Roast Cafe at Riverplace in downtown Minneapolis.
The political agenda is serious. And “The Big Gay Race” is a catchy name, but don’t be fooled by that. This was no gay pride parade. As I walked around and ran the race, I realized that what this gathering was really about was the importance of family — all families. There were people of all ages and there seemed to be equal numbers of gay and straight people, but you couldn’t really tell who was who, and it didn’t matter.
This was a loving and caring community coming together for a pro-marriage and pro-family celebration, pure and simple.
If (pseudo) religious “conservative” straight people were any good at marriage, themselves, and if their leaders were any good at helping their followers maintain healthy marriages, they would not be the LEAST bit concerned about gay marriage.
But the fact is, the highest rates of divorce are in the Bible belt, itself, and the lowest rates in the most liberal parts of the nation.
The reason for this is that most “conservatives” base their ideas of marriage on a psychologically dysfunctional set of needs for “feminine” (i.e. required to be weak) women to be dependent on others and taken care of by others,…
and “macho” (i.e. required to pretend to be strong under any and all circumstances) men to dominate others and have those around them be subservient to them.
The fact that SO FEW people actually fit these stereotypical ideals of “masculine” and “feminine” and that those who do are quite likely to be psychologically dysfunctional makes for marriages which are unable to adapt to a constantly changing world,…
and destined to deteriorate into the emotional equivalent of living in a tent on an iceberg or explode in a hot, wet, shower of pain, anguish, blame and recriminations.
Since our “conservative” friends can’t admit that they, themselves, don’t fit their own role expectations and that their marriages, based on those expectations, are often sources of continuous trouble and stress for them, they suppress that reality,…
and project their sense that their marriages are “threatened” outward onto “liberals” and GLBT folks, when in fact, the source of that threat lies precisely within their own provably false “true beliefs” about what men and women are supposed to be like and how marriage is supposed to work.
In the end, whether or not GLBT folks are allowed to marry, the rate of misery and divorce in marriages among “conservatives” will continue unabated.
“This was a loving and caring community coming together for a pro-marriage and pro-family celebration, pure and simple”.
Not quite right.
“This was a group coming together who want to alter the definition of marriage, clearly understood across cultures and across thousands of years, and to use government to enforce their socio-political ideology”.
Fixed.