Reply #77: Thanks.

[David Zephyr]

Equal protection and opportunity under the law is something I have given my life fighting for and will continue to fight for.

Like Congressman Frank, I have no inclination whatsoever to engage in an abstract fight over the subjective use of a word which has over a thousand years of usage and that is steeped in cultural significance and lodged deep within the societal psyche and that has no immediate bearing one way or the other on the rights of homosexuals.

In fact, the religious right and reactionaries are astutely masking their true intentions---which is the legal disenfranchisement of homosexuals from the benefits of equal protection of their unions under the law through codified discrimation---within the inflammatory guise of "defending marriage" or "saving marriage".

Are some within the homosexual community willing to risk depriving gay and lesbian couples from equal protections under the law with regard to real "life and death" and "bread and butter" issues like the right to vist your partner in an Intensive Care Unit, the right to inheritance, the right to adopt just in order to have the superfluous "right" to use the word "marriage" to describe their mating? That's a question that needs contemplation.

Having watched dear gay friends of mine actually (not hypothetically) be pushed out of emergency rooms by greedy families lurking near the death of a gay relative and seeing the great injustices that followed including even the exclusion of the companion from his/her loved one's funeral, I could care less about a fight over a word that I wouldn't use to describe my union anyway, especially if such a fight threatened to undermine real legal victories won over decades of struggle. I urge my gay and lesbian friends to think long and hard about that and to consider why so many of us are opposed to coopting a word that rightly belongs to heterosexual unions.








using the word "marriage" as the centerpiece of their true intenet to