According to those who would advance the proposition that marriage is primarily about having children and raising children, my current marriage should have been disallowed.
I'm fifty-five, and back on September 25, 2004, I married one of the most wonderful women in the world. This is not just my personal view. In my small community my wife is well known. All who know her hold her in the highest esteem.
But we are childless. She had a hysterectomy decades ago. We, as a married couple, cannot produce children. Therefore, according to the leading argument that the defendants produced in the current trial regarding Prop 8, our marriage is purposeless.
Pardon me for a moment. I need to stop laughing before I can get back to writing. No, check that. I need to stop crying at the senseless stupidity of such a profound fallacy. That such a fallacy should even be considered to have so much as a grain of truth in the 21st century is something to grieve about.
Call me clueless, but I have always understood marriage to be first and foremost about love. That is to say, without love as the essential foundation between the partners in a marriage, then is not the marriage anything more than a business contract, any other objectives notwithstanding?
So, according to those who would advance the proposition that marriage is primarily about reproduction, my love for my spouse is secondary or tertiary or even lesser.
To that, I can only say Go Cheney Yourself.
My love for my wife is permanent, and it cannot be removed. I married her because I love her, will always love her, and that love is permanent and cannot be removed.
These are the vows I spoke to her that day, September 25, 2004, in the presence of approximately one hundred witnesses, then signed and attested to by the legal presiding cleric:
To My loving Pamela Jo:
Once, when we were younger, a certain fate brought our hearts together, then caused our paths to sunder. Our love bloomed, then was stilled, and we knew our love no longer. Now a certain fate has rejoined the paths of our lives, and we walk as one.
An ember of our love has slept, safe and secret in my breast, lo these years, and your eyes and heart have fanned it to a new blaze of joy and fulfillment. I love you, Pamela Jo, with all the fire of my life.
I want you for my wife, and so I here and now and for all my days pledge my devotion to you. I vow to cherish and honor you, to treat you only with kindness, respect, and love, and I promise to be your faithful husband and life partner, placing you now as above all others in my heart. I give, without any reservation utterly, my love and life to you for as long as we live.
Despite all my shortcomings, despite my problems, despite our problems, I hold to those vows. Despite my failure to live up to those vows, I still hold them as a commitment of love.
My marriage to Pam had nothing to do about having children. It was only about love, because love must come first.
There is no more powerful force in the universe than love.
I don't care who you are. If you are a legal adult and you consent to love another legal adult you ought to have the right to marriage.
"And that's all I have to say about that." --Forrest Gump