Straight people, if you are thinking of getting married, I highly recommend attending a gay wedding. The Unitarian Universalist Church on Franklin and Geary will be holding a marathon of them from November 1-4.

Really, go, you’ll learn something invaluable. You’ll learn that a wedding is about joy.

If proposition 8 were to pass, Feh, Feh, it would not only be a defeat for gay marriage but a defeat for joy.

That is the most amazing aspect of a gay wedding. The joy is palpable. It is bouncing through the room, perfuming the air. When the ceremony ends the room bursts into raucous applause and people begin to hoot and holler.

It is the marriage of the two meanings of the word gay; both the modern slang for couples of the same sex and the thousand year old term meaning joy or great mirth. The modern slang has overshadowed the original meaning. You may read about “gaiety” now and then but rarely will someone refer to having a “gay old time.”

There is joy and great mirth at these oh so modern weddings. They truly are gay. And in being so they return marriage to one of its essences.

One essence of marriage is the contract, a deal struck between two people involving assets. There’s the dowry (current assets), a promise of children (future assets), and the promise to take care of one another (perpetuity assets). Guests are invited to witness the deal and hold people to that contract.

Not a very enticing picture. As we evolved we sewed love into the fabric. Now guests were invited to witness the declaration of that love. Guests were invited to witness a man and a woman state, “I choose you.”

That is the essence of modern marriage, to stand before your community and declare, “This is the person I love.”

And oh, how we lost that.

How common and expected it is to see a bride and groom stressed out as their nuptials approach.

What’s the guest count?

Will Aunt Aida be offended if we don’t invite her?
Yes.
But she lives in Minneapolis and hasn’t left her house in fourteen years.
Doesn’t matter.

What about the menu? Should we serve fish?
It has to be sustainably caught.
Well, didn’t George and Martha have Aquaman cater their wedding? Let’s get his number.

And the venue?
I’d like to get married in the Church I grew up in.
Well, I want to get married in a house built of sustainably farmed straw by three humanely treated little pigs.

Straight people suffer under the weight of a massive paradigm.

Women who have been dreaming and revising their weddings for twenty-five years, the church, the dress, the music, the first dance.

Men who have been told that on that day their joy ends.

Ah, straight weddings, a bride nervous in case it is not exactly as she pictured it and a groom nervous in case it is exactly as he pictured it.

Gay marriage has no such paradigm. Gay couples have not spent a lifetime watching gay weddings in movies, hearing their mother’s tale of her gay wedding day, or going to their perfect gay sister’s perfect gay wedding.

Gay marriage is a virgin forest, pristine in its utter newness. There has been no time for anything to grow other than the essence of marriage.

At a gay wedding there is great joy at the right to stand before your community and say, “This is the person I love. I choose you.” There is little else.

There are two great ironies in all this.

One is that all those people who oppose gay marriage, those who will vote yes on proposition 8, believe marriage is sacred. And here they are opposing the marriage of people who have stripped marriage down to its sacred essence.

These people opposing gay marriage got married in the right church, to the right person, in front of the right people, with the right food and the right pop song to dance too; possibly by Elton John.

Many of them simply missed the point. But they’ll be damned, quite literally, if they allow two people to marry in the spirit of love, and little else.

The other irony is that if proposition 8 is defeated and gay marriage slowly becomes precedent these current marriages of joy will be a short-lived experience. Within a generation gay men and women will have built up their own paradigms. They will have their own images to live up to, their own dreams to get just right.

It will be beautiful because gay people will take the right to get married for granted. And it will be terrible because gay people will start worrying about inviting Aunt Aida and wearing the perfect outfit and finding three humanely treated little pigs who know how to build.

There will be joy, but joy tempered by expectation.

Right now there is only joy. It’s a beautiful thing.

So vote no on 8. Vote for joy.