On hospital visitation rights:
I fear it’s a way to tell gays they cannot marry. The Democrats will say: see, you can already have hospital visitation rights. Now please stop alienating people with all this civil rights talk. And the Human Rights Campaign can last a thousand years mediating these morsels of compassion from the executive branch. I favor the right to designate anyone in advance as your next of kin in hospital. But for gays, I favor merely the same rights as straights. Which means to say: no more and no less than civil marriage.
I am just as much in favor of marriage equality as any other young person who gives a shit about the dignity of LGBTs, but I am still ambivalent about the efficacy of marriage in general, and I have more than had my fill of well-meaning older grownups who want me to believe that marriage is the magic elixir to everyone’s problems. Breaking news: it isn’t.
We will never have a society in which everyone who lives past the age of 20 manages to get married and stay that way, and what’s more, that is a good thing. It is a positive sign that economics and social pressure do not succeed in coercing all eligible adults into tying themselves to people who might or might not turn out to be good partners in the long run. It is a positive sign, also, that people who find that their spouses are not the lifelong soulmates they thought they were, and in fact are miserably stultifying people to live with, have the liberty to divorce. For some people, regardless of sexual orientation, marriage simply never happens. For many, it doesn’t work out.
There is no natural reason why civil law and institutional rules have to make life (and death) needlessly difficult for people who have not had the good fortune to get married and make it work. We are not a problem, and we do not need to be marginalized at the end of our lives. Even if Obama were all in favor of marriage equality–which he doesn’t seem to be–he could not make it a nationwide legal reality any time soon. With or without Obama’s support, same-sex marriage is going to take some years to catch on. In the meantime, there is absolutely nothing wrong with treating unmarried people like human beings, for a change.
The Monster's Ink 