Same-sex marriage in the CNMI

The House of Representatives finally held its public hearing on the initiative that seeks to limit marriages in the CNMI exclusively to couples of opposite sexes. Of the testimonies presented in support of the measure, I’m pretty sure that nothing was more startling than the statement of one individual who said homosexuality is a practice, hence the result of a conscious choice. Startling because this is innately illogical and is a quaint holdover from the decadence of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s.

With the flowering of that era’s concept of free love and the swinging lifestyle that soon took hold, people felt free to experiment on all kinds of sexual lifestyles, including straight people…uh…shall we say “straying over to the other side of the fence” to see how the grass grows, so to speak. After all, surveys have shown that one of the most common fantasies of straight people is making love with someone of the same sex. Of course, nature being the way it is, people naturally gravitated back to what they find attractive in the first place. So straight men who experimented with gay sex soon found themselves going back to a heterosexual “lifestyle,” while those who were homosexuals in the first place, stayed. That’s why you have an older David Bowie describing himself in a magazine interview as a “closet heterosexual,” having gone back to being straight after a brief flirtation with the gay culture. That’s why, after numerous books about her pansexual exploits in the boudoir, you have Xaviera Hollander later confessing that she prefers men to women. This, however, ruined it for most homosexuals, as it cemented in the minds of some people the idea that sexuality, like a light bulb, can be turned on and off at will. Or somewhat akin to choosing a flannel shirt for today and an herringbone shirt for tomorrow.

Which is, of course, patently erroneous and, as I said, illogical because, with all the public opprobrium and the ridicule that homosexuals are subjected to, why do gay people remain gay? To put it in another way, what kind of person in his or her right mind would choose to be a homosexual? Notwithstanding the great strides made by the rainbow community since the Stonewall riots and the popularity of television shows such as Will and Grace and Bravo’s Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, it takes little to whip up the public over the issue of homosexuality. Look at San Francisco and Massachusetts. Beneath the veneer of tolerance engendered by the demands of political correctness, a lot of people, particularly the older generation, still sneer at gays and lesbians, more often than not looking down on them as nothing more than a source of cheap jokes and the subject of hurtful remarks and snickers that people don’t even bother to hide. Why would people choose to be subjected to this?

That’s not even the worst of it. In some countries, you can be killed or publicly ostracized for being a homosexual. Look at what happened nearly two years ago in Saudi Arabia, when they rounded up several men, held them up to public ridicule, and sent them to prison, supposedly because they were homosexuals. Look at what happened to former Malaysian deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim, who was stripped of his post and sent to prison because of accusations of homosexuality. That’s not to forget the thousands of homosexuals who were massacred by the murderous regime of Germany’s Adolf Hitler during World War II to cleanse the Aryan race of “impurities.” Why would anyone actually choose to be gay in a society that kills anyone of that orientation? That’s not only illogical but suicidal.

This is not even taking into consideration the personal toll that homosexuals pay for their sexual orientation, seeing all their friends and childhood playmates growing up and finding people to love and share their lives with, while they remain on the sidelines, finding solace in cheap sex while growing old day by day, with no one to share their triumphs and defeats with because society thinks that they are not entitled to those rights that straight people claim for themselves. And you think people choose this kind of life? Why would anyone make this awful choice? For cheap thrills? People actually condemn themselves to this lonely hell just for the sheer joy of wallowing in the misery of it all? C’mon, I’m sure not all of them are drama queens.

Occam’s razor tells us that one should not make more assumptions than the minimum needed. Using this principle and applying it to the question why a homosexual would continue to be one in the face of so much personal hardship and public persecution leads one to the only logical explanation—that being gay is not a choice but something a person is born with, no more subject to choice than a leopard can about his spots.

The bigger question, though, is why straight people feel threatened by same-sex marriage? One cannot foist the argument that same-sex marriage would debase or threaten the fabric of society because straight people have done quite a good job at wrecking marriage among themselves. Heterosexuals have not exactly been paragons of virtue in terms of keeping the sanctity of marriage. The skyrocketing divorce rate, the rampant infidelity, the multiple sex partners, the increasing number of illegitimate children—these are all by heterosexual people who claim to preserve the fabric of society. So any contention that same-sex marriage would threaten that so-called fabric is nothing more than a hollow nod to a false idol, symptomatic of the superficial morality of people who look at a church not so much as a site of worship but a place to see and be seen.

I say, let the gay community have its marriage. Maybe, just maybe, they will do a better job of it themselves. Or perhaps, in the end, we will all find out that they, just like everybody else, make the same mistakes, commit the same infidelities, and fumble in the dark in their efforts to create that perfect marriage; that, after all the hue and cry, we are all the same imperfect people, striving for perfection in this imperfect world.