Marriage is a Heterosexual Vault

by Michael A. Jones 

While hundreds of thousands of couples celebrated Valentine's Day with a romantic dinner, a movie, flowers and chocolate-covered strawberries, a gaggle of straight couples joined consumer activist Rev. Billy Talen for a mass "UnWedding" in Central Park. The point? To suspend their marriages or pledge not to get married until marriage is open to all couples, both gay and straight.
Rev. Billy, a consumer activist known for his Church of Life After Shopping, led the "UnWedding," telling onlookers that marriage was nothing more than a "heterosexual vault," and led the crowd in chants of "Stop Fear" and "Freedom to Love." For Rev. Billy, "making marriage a gated community, is tantamount to violence."

\The event couples well with a week-long series of events meant to mark Freedom to Marry week. From Illinois to Minnesota to Paris, France, activists demonstrated for marriage equality and gay rights, in some cases risking arrest. In Orlando, a performance artist actually married a total stranger of the opposite sex, to show how ridiculously hypocritical it is to allow men and women who barely know each other to get married, while gay and lesbian couples who've been together for decades can't tie the knot in 45 states. And in Buffalo, a woman who was refused a same-sex marriage license turned to a crowd of onlookers and promptly married a male stranger.

At the Central Park "UnWedding," one couple, Leo Glickman and Debbie Nabavian -- told the Village Voice that if their 3-year-old daughter turned out to be a lesbian, they would want her to have the right to marry.

"The idea that if she were gay she couldn't enjoy the same rights and privileges and joys that her parents enjoy in marriage makes us angry and makes us want to support gay marriage," Glickman said. The couple then retracted their vows.

Sure, is there a certain level of performance art to all of this? Absolutely. But there's definitely a powerful punch delivered by straight people showing their solidarity for the marriage equality movement. Whether it's in the form of an "UnWedding," or through campaigns like the National Marriage Boycott, folks are waking up to the fact that marriage in its current form discriminates.