Why would I want to be integrated into a burning house?  — James Baldwin

In all the intense and wide-ranging testimony about the Marriage Equality bills (SB 6239 and HB 2516) nobody asked an obvious question: Why would anyone want to be married by the state?

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Even the most cursory glance at the history of marriage in the Western world reveals an institution whose primary purpose has been to oppress and exploit women and hoard and protect property while naturalizing a heterosexual romantic narrative that disguises power arrangements that are overwhelmingly homosocial and homoerotic.  If you’re looking for an institution with which to reinforce gender and class inequality, you couldn’t do much better than marriage.  And yet no one in the legislature has introduced a bill to abolish marriage.

And everyone who testified about marriage equality seemed to take it for granted that marriage as we know it is something that’s generally O.K.  The folks who testified for the bills talked persuasively about the mainstream legitimacy and the boatload of social and economic benefits that will come with marriage.

The people who testified against the bills, on the other hand, brought nothing less than the Wrath of God.  The unblinking, possessed looks in their eyes, the slight quiver in their hands, and the thunder in their voices as they talked of abominations against nature had us here at the blog just about ready to repent, head to the confessional and save our heathen souls before it’s too late.

But then we remembered what we’d have to give up if we started living our lives within the bounds of what nature has given us.  Clothing, for example, is not found in nature, to say nothing of iPhones and Prius’s.  Cooking your food isn’t natural.  Heck, crapping in a toilet, instead of wherever the urge hits, is not natural.  So, after a long struggle with our inner blog, we resigned ourselves to an eternity in hell and took the side of Katherine Hepburn when she imperiously told Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen that Nature is what we were put on this earth to overcome.

And it has been a great comfort to us to see so many other prominent straight people (many of whose best friends are no doubt gay) having the same wrestling match with their consciences over this issue.  Senator Mary Margaret Haugen, who announced herself as the pivotal twenty-fifth vote in the senate, evoked memories of those crusty white people reluctantly embracing civil rights, as she talked about generational differences and strong Christian beliefs.  And Governor Gregoire dominated a whole news cycle when she soliloquized like Dante about her 7 year journey (7 years that gay Washingtonians were denied equality, but who’s counting) and worried about the Vatican (no doubt a legitimate fear given how hard the Catholic Church has come down on those bishops who looked the other way while priests abused children).

But still nobody paused to suggest that now that we’re about to give more people access to the burning house of marriage perhaps we should do a little something about putting out the fire.  Perhaps we should at least think a bit about an institution that to this day remains, at least symbolically, an exchange of woman as property between two men (“Who gives this woman to be married to this man?”), an institution that created the concept of spousal abuse.

And it may be that a greater inclusion will change the institution for the better.  After all the love and monogamy and parenthood smoke has cleared, what the legislature and the governor will have enacted is greater access to basic rights like health care, equal taxation, binding wills, and the ability to visit loved ones in the hospital.  And that will be a great thing that should have been done a long time ago.

And perhaps this law will move us a little bit closer to a Washington where people don’t have to live in fear of social exile or losing their jobs or being beaten or killed simply for who and how they choose to love.

What we do know for sure is that something is probably changing for the better, otherwise so many angry people wouldn’t be about to spend so much money on a referendum to overturn a law on which the ink has barely dried.