Dec 23, 2005  |  By: CHRIS CRAIN  | COMMENTS     

IT’S ABOUT TIME we took a deep breath on our headlong sprint to the altar. If you think about it, we’re rushing to get married with about as much forethought as Britney Spears, resplendent in torn jeans and a ballcap, at the Little White Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas.

A couple of nights in bed with her childhood flame back in January 2004, and the pop princess popped the question. Within 24 hours, they were married. Fifty-five hours after that, the marriage had been annulled.

We’ve spent about that much time, in a sense, really thinking about marriage: the impact we will have on the institution, and the impact the institution will have on us.

Marriage wasn’t even a major issue on “the gay agenda” until the Hawaii Supreme Court struck down that state’s marriage laws back in 1993, a decision that was later overturned by voters in a constitutional amendment. And it didn’t reach the forefront until the Massachusetts Supreme Court did the same, a decade later.

But it’s even more fundamental than that. Gay people have only been entering into long-term relationships en masse since not long before Britney was born. The devastating early years of AIDS cut short the experiment for the first generation of gay men to try it, even as the disease made coupling look like a much more attractive option than before.

So we’re novices, as a group, with the institution of marriage, and even the idea of long-term relationships, although a small number of gay couples have, of course, admirably defied the odds and stood the test of time.

Being newbies to the altar should have no bearing on the legal battle for marriage equality. Our Constitution guarantees us equal protection under the laws, and that central promise of freedom is violated by the exclusion of gay couples from traditional marriage laws.

The justifications offered to limit marriage to straight couples are completely irrational, as the Hawaii Supreme Court concluded in 1993, and that ruling has since been echoed, in unbroken succession, by the courts in Alaska (1998), Vermont (1999) and Massachusetts (2003) — not to mention the courts in Canada (2003) and South Africa (2005).

That’s because the real reasons for keeping gays from marrying have more to do with the religious sentiment of the majority, or outright animus toward gays — and neither is a permissible basis for official discrimination by our government.

BUT EVEN IF we win the legal battle, are we really ready for marriage? It’s already happening, of course, in Massachusetts and Canada, in Holland and Belgium and Spain.

And as it happens more and more, in America and abroad, we will be influencing marriage as an institution, and it will be influencing us. Not in the way our opponents would suggest: We won’t tear at the fabric of society or cheapen the institution. But we will undoubtedly affect it.

At its core, marriage has been intended for couples who are ready to enter into a lifetime commitment, to the exclusion of all others, until death do them part. That’s true of marriage as a legal institution — just look at divorce and adultery laws — as well as a social institution, and certainly as a religious institution.

Whatever the actual experience of heterosexual couples with cheating, divorce and remarrying — which are seen as threats to the institution, not ways to enrich it — the expectations of monogamy and lifetime commitment have been a central part of getting married.

Gay couples, on the other hand, have until now been free of rules like these, and as a result have created many relationships that defy society’s basic expectations.

Call it progress or call it an “alternative lifestyle,” but we all know that many gay male couples have agreed to have sexually open relationships, and even many monogamous lesbian and gay male couples see their relationships in the present tense, or for the foreseeable future, rather than as lifetime commitments.

I still remember a gay couple who were interviewed after becoming among the first to legally tie the knot, in Provincetown, Mass., in May 2004. They seemed surprised when they were asked if getting married meant that they would be monogamous for life.

That’s never been critical to making our relationship work, one of the men told the reporter, so why should it be now?

Ask that same question at your next heterosexual wedding, even if it’s at the Little White Wedding Chapel in Vegas, and see how many times you get the same answer.

IT MAY BE that marriage will have ...