While reading Cynthia Nixon's recent
Modified screen shot from the movie Avatar
Here's the problem; New York State is flat broke and we've got a 9 billion dollar gap in our forthcoming budget.
Think of it as opening a foreign market up to ourexports, although in its current state of affairs it might be the most suspectproduct offering since shipping the Pinto to Japan. In 1990 9.8 people for every 1000 of us in the United Statesmarried.
Let's add up all that cheddar. Americans spend an average of $25,000 on their celebrationsbut lets be honest, in New York you couldn't rent a closet large enough for thePatterson re-election committee for that kind of scratch. Cynthia and Michelle aren't escaping the
I'mgoing to say that the average wedding held in the city is going to run to$75,000, therefore we could boost our local economy with an immediate jolt of2.85 billion dollars, followed by another billion every year in queercouplings.
Wedding rings by gay jeweler Nora Kogan for St Kilda.
But seriously folks, this is about love and light.
Old ideas about marriage, its nature, itssocial purpose, its stability, and its sanctity have been steadily questionedever since the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the discovery of reliablebirth-control. This has occasioned a great deal of uneasiness, as anydisruption of custom and expectation is bound to do, and with this comesviewing with alarm, denunciations, and rear-guard efforts to paste up theshreds of patriarchal history.
Knowing this, there is certainly a touchingconfidence revealed in the continuing idea that sacred ceremony can serve tosafeguard any personal (and commonly all-too-often impermanent) efforts atfidelity and solemn covenant.
Robert L. Powers and his wife Jane Griffith of almost 30 years
To shift to my Clinical Psychology position, I canonly add that it is crazy to oppose the actions of people who mean no harm toyou, and do no harm to you. The less sympathy you are able to have for peopleunlike you the more vulnerable you are to mental illness and every otherself-crippling limitation. The less you are able to treasure the variant on thehuman possibilities of loyalty and mutual care represented by those whoseexperiences of life are and have been, often painfully, unlike yours, and themore hostile and antagonistic your feelings are with respect to them, thegreater the danger, to you and to the rest of us, that you will be inclined todo harm. The commandment to love your neighbor as yourself has nothing to dowith religious customs and ceremony. It is the formula for the common life ofhumankind, and of all life, and of all being, to receive, to pass on, and tobestow the happiness that is at the heart of every Blessing.