While I’m am sure this will be a great disappointment to my legions of female fans, Kelly and I tied the knot on June 27th, 2006, at around 2:00 pm PDT.  I am now a married man. And let me tell you, life is exactly the same.  Nothing has changed between Kelly and I.  It was a fifteen minute ceremony that gave us new rights as a couple, but had no fundamental impact on our relationship.  We’re atheist and don’t plan to have a family, and none of that will change.  We’ve been together over six years now, so why did we choose to get married now?

Money.  That’s right, just money.  As cold as that sounds, let me assure you, that whatever legal status we have in the eyes of the law, we were always as real a couple as any married couple.  However, the laws in this country pretty much force you to get married.  Because she is officially my wife, I can take larger deductions from my taxes and she now has health insurance through my company.  Those are the biggest new rights, but there are scores of other rights we now have as a couple, and lots of unofficial ones too.  Just saying "oh, my wife wanted me to check into this" gets me through any sort of security related to her bank or credit card companies.   Marriage has an exalted status in this country, and after a while, you kind of just have to do it, or you’re throwing money away.

Of course, marriage is only available to heterosexual couples in this country.  For some reason, religious zealots in this country ranging from George Bush to John Kerry believe civilization would crumble to the ground if Adam and Steve were able to share health insurance.  That’s all anyone wants from the legal status of marriage.  The benefits, the insurance, the ability to make life decisions for a partner if the situation arises.  If godbaggers feel the need to disallow gay marriage inside their church, our constitution gives them that right.  However, it’s time to get with the times, and allow two consenting adults form the legal institution we call marriage.  Better yet, call it a civil union, and leave marriage to religions. 

Yeah, that’s a much better way to handle it.   I’m not longer married, I’m civilly unioned.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 15th, 2006 at 6:09 pm and is filed under Politics, Religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.