World wide wed

A little over a week ago, voters of all affiliations breathed a sigh of relief – even if their candidates lost, or referendum issues didn’t go their way. The relief was borne of a desire to see an end to the political bickering and bitterness that was a hallmark of the 2012 campaign, in which insults and accusations were flung more prolifically than those spouted by professional wrestlers and Celebrity Deathmatch contestants. The negative ads have ceased, the debate showdowns are over, and the country is in recovery mode, catching its breath after a headlong sprint toward closure and finality.

So you’d think the time for political analysis is over. Which is why I’m hesitant to talk about Question 1, the referendum in which Maine voters decided to allow gay and lesbian couples to marry. You’re sick of hearing about it, and I don’t blame you. I certainly don’t want to be accused of shooting after the buzzer, and besides, with the election season properly buried, resurrecting its corpse feels a bit like reanimating Frankenstein’s monster, only without the drooling and electroshock.

Indulge me, if you would.

For a news guy, Election Night is like the Olympics, minus the chlorine and speedos. I spent much of it with my attention split between news broadcasts and the Internet, monitoring progress as results trickled in. One of the web sites I tracked was Facebook – which is an interesting forum for debate in that it’s free of punditry and half-baked analysis from tired, over-caffeinated broadcasters in wrinkled suits. My feed was awash in opinions from friends and family, and their updates were an insight into the demographics comprising my little online circle – dominated, it seems, by moderate voters with an enthusiasm for the process, if not necessarily the results.

One woman shared a story that I feel bears repeating.

This woman – we’ll call her “Stacy” – was asked by her four-year-old daughter if she could accompany her mother to the polls on Election Day. Stacey agreed, and so brought the young one to her local polling place to give the toddler a peek into the voting process. Stacy told her daughter that, aside from voting for the nation’s president, she would also be voicing her opinion on a critical issue: Whether same-sex couples should be allowed to marry.

“What do you think?” she asked her daughter. “Should men be able to marry other men, and women marry other women?” The daughter asked if that meant a couple they knew would finally be able to tie the knot; Stacy said that, yes, it would. The child looked up at her mother with a delighted giggle and said, “Oh, I really hope other people pick ‘Yes!’”

“I have often thought how important it is to teach tolerance to my children,” said Stacey in her post, “but as you can see from this simple anecdote, children are intrinsically tolerant. They only learn to think otherwise from the role models in their lives. It did feel great, though, to nurture that inherent tolerance with which my beautiful daughter was born.”

That made me smile. And it allowed me to envision a future in which the next generation sees same-sex marriage as an immutable right, as unchangeable as the right of women to vote, blacks to marry whites, and speech to be free.

Opponents of same-sex marriage have repeatedly argued that such unions would somehow impinge on their own marriages, effectively devaluing them like a defunct currency. But here’s what happened to their marriages on the day after the election: Nothing. They woke up, kissed their spouses, ate buttery toast in their breakfast nooks, and plotted their days. Business as usual.

A marriage is a personal relationship. That is where its value lies. It is a bond that exists independent of the marriages of others, of widespread divorce, of politics and punditry. And now, in Maine, it exists independent of sexual orientation. When the Declaration of Independence established a person’s right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, it did so without an asterisk. It did so without discrimination.

Stacey’s daughter has not read the country’s founding documents, and would not be able to articulate that sentiment. But children often know what is fair, and they know it with purity of heart. It is adulthood that sours that purity and turns it against itself, masquerading as maturity and wisdom.

That child deserves a country that is tolerant and free. Same-sex marriage isn’t the skeleton key that opens the door fully on that reality. But it’s a start.