Via Miriam at Feministing

I would just as soon be tied in a burlap sack and tossed off a bridge as married, but I’m gonna be pissed off if this all comes to naught. And ecstatic if it doesn’t.

Vermont artist and blogger Alison Bechdel, graphic artist and blogger.

I haven’t mentioned the battles for and against universal marriage lately because still I feel kind of ambivalent about what the real whys and wherefores of linking it to the legal system might be.

But whatever the original purpose might have been, the subset of people allowed to exercise a legal right to marriage benefit from literally hundreds of thousands of public and private statutes, policies, provisions, and conventions.

And so while I’m personally rooting for the possibility that California will strike down all civil recognition of marriage in favor of, well, civil unions**, I’m really glad to see Iowa, D.C., and now Vermont doing the really, very, affirmatively right thing. More please.

[** I still think people who want to go through secular or non-secular wedding ceremonies should do so. And it’s even ok if some secular adherents want to limit who they spiritually sanction with marriage. I mean for heaven’s sake we let them sanction all sorts of other whacky, and even regressive stuff. I just don’t get, at all, what business it is of the law to let secular authorities have discriminatory veto power over couple’s individual and civil rights. —fl]