Last week I read a column by Evan Casper-Futterman about “gay marriage” (“Gay marriage debate provides impetus to critique a troubled American institution,” 04.05.07 issue of The Miscellany News) that really bothered me. I still cannot decide whether to be offended or amused. I have read, and re-read, this article several more times than it deserved. You see, I still don’t know if I have divined the point the author intended to make.

The author seems to make several nebulous points which the reader is supposed to understand somehow, and perhaps that understanding would be more attainable if I had seen the movie that is vaguely referred to at the beginning of this article. I assume that the movie was a pseudo-documentary intended to convince the viewers to believe (or to do) something ... but I don’t know what that something is, nor do I know whether my assumption is correct.

The author seems to be making a point about marriage, but fails to clearly convey that point, and I am left wondering what it is that the author suggests “straight allies” should be doing. I don’t know if the author is suggesting expansion beyond the inclusion of same-sex couples in the institution of marriage, nor can I begin to guess what further steps the author might be alluding to. I also do not know if the author is suggesting abolishing marriage outright, which would be an extremely academic exercise, given that as a legal and societal institution, marriage is no longer necessary. Marriage—the sacramental kind performed in a church without the need for legal documents—would survive the legal institution of marriage because it pre-dates it. Socially, the stigma of cohabitation is all but forgotten, and the “marriage penalty” (which causes married taxpayers to pay more taxes than they would if they were not married, and merely shared a residence) would not be missed.

There are certain legal benefits to legal marriage, but with a little effort, most if not all of those benefits can be legally obtained outside of marriage. Honestly, unless the author is suggesting somehow forcing churches to stop performing the religious marriage ceremony for those couples who desire it, the dream doesn’t really bother me. That is, if I am correctly interpreting that dream to mean that the author hopes to see marriage abolished entirely. If, instead, the author is talking about a cataclysmic redefinition of legal marriage to include not only straight and same-sex couples but also some imaginary other type(s) of marriage, I am a bit concerned.

I guess you could say the article offended me, not because it advocated the legalizing of “gay marriage” (which I insist on placing in quotes because gay marriage is not illegal in the United States; gay people can legally marry, as long as they marry someone of the opposite sex) but rather because it fails to make even one clear point. I am offended because I have had conversations with students who have had articles rejected for vague or unclear language, articles which made far more sense to me than this one.

—Don Conroy, Retreat Kitchen Worker