Women. Sometimes I have a hard time believing I’ve grown up enough — in years anyway — to consider myself a “man” chasing after “women.” It wasn’t so long ago that I shuddered to ask these GIRLS to Homecoming or out to a movie some Friday night. I’m sure females as well view the change from “boyz II men” as one that took place seemingly overnight.
This change is one that seems pretty confusing to most people, including me. Have we earned this upgrade in status? What kind of benefits do we get from being a man as opposed to being a boy? Does it come with a wife and two kids? How often are we still allowed to act like boys? All these questions plague me constantly, but I will not be writing about their answers today. Instead, I want to address an issue much more important in nature: gay marriage.
In college, we all have our chances to go out and meet new people and develop the relationships we want to have and disregard the rest. After college, however, the goal of most people is to find someone they truly care about and whom they can settle down with for the rest of their lives. While the crazy world of dating is full of mistakes and hasty decisions, marriage is supposed to be a time when we can feel utterly certain that we are making the right choice about who and what is best for us in the long run — even though about half of these marriages fail to live up to our standards. It seems to me that part of becoming men and women is the ability to think in the long term about who will make us happy and to have enough faith in those people to make it a public display for our closest friends that this is THE one.
In our country, however, there are millions of men and women unable to make this lifelong commitment under law. Let me say that again: There are millions of MEN and WOMEN in the United States who aren’t given the ability to choose for themselves what is in their own best interest. These people go to college, work jobs, pay car insurance, take walks in the park, etc., just like every average American straight person. Their responsibilities differ very little from anyone else who lives in 21st century America, and they have thus grown up to be mature enough to make their own decisions.
Why, then, do we constantly question their ability to find love? As a whole, I think our generation is pretty horrible at finding love, though no more horrible than those that came before us. We bump into people in life, we are attracted to them and we say, “Hey, now that’s a person I could look at every morning for the rest of my life.” Heaven forbid the scoundrels open their mouths, but man, look at those baby blues! When we tell our friends that we are in love, the reaction is rarely one of questioning or disapproval, but rather a kind of pat on the back or “way to go,” even if your friends think that it is the dumbest thing you have ever gotten yourself into.
What I’m getting at is this: If we care enough for our friends not to question their happiness on the issue of love, why would we question someone else’s? Do we not trust homosexuals to be competent enough to understand their own desires and wishes, and then to turn those dreams into realities that last a lifetime? I am proud to be on what I think is the path to becoming a good man in a world of compromise and moral laziness and I am equally as proud to see that most of my peers seem to be going down the same road, including you young ladies out there. If we all turn out half as good as we have the potential to be, this world could see changes we never dreamed of and that ever pleasant state of things: peace.
In making the world a better place, however, it is necessary to trust that our neighbor is doing his best to make the world better as well. Otherwise, recycling one can or turning off one light might really be a fruitless venture. It is only with all of our minds working together that we can achieve our goals. Let us trust our peers, then, to make their own decisions about love. Let them carve out their dreams from the years we have ahead of us. Let them become the men and women we all set out to be when we were just children, and for God’s sake, legalize gay marriage. They should have never needed permission to seek love in the first place.
Andy’s columns run biweekly Mondays. He can be reached at a.taylor@cavalierdaily.com.
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