Perhaps you remember the long-running Peanuts gag involving Lucy, Charlie Brown, and the football. It was always funny, because so many people can relate to the feelings of hope (even in the face of reality) and disappointment Charlie Brown experienced, over and over again. Lucy would hold a football to the grass in kicking position and get Charlie Brown to try kicking it, only to snatch it away at the last minute. This meant Charlie Brown kicked only air and landed on his butt. It was cruel of Lucy, and Charlie Brown got wise to it eventually, but she'd always sweet-talk him into trying again. This time, he always convinced himself, he'd send that ball soaring!

This is sort of how my wife and I feel about same-gender marriage. We met in the summer of 1992, between our junior and senior years of high school. Shortly after we decided that we love each other after all, a Hawaiian judge ruled that same-gender marriage was constitutional. The Hawaii Supreme Court decided differently in 1999. Vermont allowed a sort of Diet Marriage in its state with "civil unions." Thousands of couples descended on San Francisco to marry when Mayor Gavin Newsom ordered city clerks to issue same-gender couples marriage licenses in 2004, only to have their new legal status yanked out from under them weeks afterwards. Eventually, on New Year's Eve 2004/2005, my wife and I became married in Massachussetts. The wait was due in part to reasons that may sound familiar to some straight people--we were taught to be overly cautious regarding matters of the heart in our childhoods, we had formed lives in different cities, we weren't sure whether we actually wanted to live together. But at bottom, we just didn't want the football yanked away from us once we finally decided to kick it. It was anyway, when the Massachussetts Supreme Court ruled that same-gender couples who lived out of state couldn't marry in Massachussetts. As I write, we literally do not know our legal status and are waiting anxiously for the New York Appeals Court ruling. We plan to have a "re-wedding" if the Court rules our way. We worry that it'll be taken away yet again if we do.

I say all this to illustrate why same-gender couples may not rush to get married at the moment. Wherever same-gender marriages have been declared legal in the United States, activist groups, mostly Christian Nationalist, have swooped in to make them un-happen like so many raptors looking for a kill. Even in Massachussetts, couples can't feel too comfortable about their legal status. On July 12, 2006, the Massachusetts State Legislature will take up the so-called "Marriage Protection Amendment". Should 25 percent of the legislature vote for it, the citizens of Massachusetts will vote on the legality of same-gender marriages in 2008. Those of you who have had a mixed-gender wedding know what a production those can be. Gay and bisexual people have friends and family and wedding fantasies, too. But how many straight people would spend all that money and go to all that trouble for something that can be invalidated at the whims of legislators or fellow citizens?

Focus on the Family's Citizen magazine published an article in its June 2006 issue that presents an interesting argument. Essentially, one Caleb H. Price claims that gays don't really want marriage, because after all, so few same-gender couples have taken advantage of the rights we have already. According to their specious statistics, only small minorities of states' "homosexual populations" have entered domestic partnerships, civil unions, and marriages. The numbers vary from 1.17 percent (in Connecticut, which offers civil unions) to 16 percent of "in-state homosexuals" (in Vermont, which also offers civil unions.)

Price invalidates his own arguments in several places. For example, he states that "Indeed, by October 2002, Vermont granted civil unions to couples from 48 states, D.C., Canada, Japan and several countries in Europe." The fact that people have traveled so far to a state not widely considered a tourist destination, solely for this purpose, should indicate some level of "want-to" on the part of gay and bi people. Price also somehow overlooked the 4,000 same-gender couples who were married in San Francisco and then un-married by the California Supreme Court.

He further states that "California established its domestic-partnership registry on Jan. 1, 2000, and expanded benefits and responsibilities in 2002, 2003 and 2005." New Jersey also "modestly expanded benefits." Could it be that same-gender couples simply didn't want to settle for something whose benefits needed to be expanded?

Price, with the help of a "pro-family" activist from Massachusetts, makes his organization's true intent clear. He approvingly quotes Kris Mineau, president of the Massachusetts Family Institute, as saying that "same-sex marriage is more of a political trophy than it is an institution that homosexuals desire to enter into." In that case, why is it such a threat to "traditional families"? Obviously, rather than the "protection of marriage," the goal of Focus on the Family and its sympathizers is simply to take what they consider a trophy away from gay and bisexual people.

At the end of the article, Price comes to a rather interesting conclusion about what gays "really" want:

As the evidence above suggests, the percentage of homosexuals who take advantage of the opportunity to enter into a legally recognized union is markedly low. Simultaneously, however, the well-orchestrated demands for same-sex marriage by activists are reaching a dramatic crescendo, begging the question: What do gays really want?

While winning the right to marry may be the "crown jewel" of the gay-rights movement, what homosexuals really want is for homosexuality to be declared normative, natural and God-ordained. Their deepest desire is that homosexual behavior would no longer be sin. At its core, the homosexual zeitgeist seeks to destroy God's created intent for sexuality and the family while deconstructing the imago dei that humans bear--male and female--on the Earth.

Truly an epic battle is being waged both in the spirit and the flesh. As Bible-believing Christians, we are being called to defend one of the most fundamental principles of God's created order--marriage between one man and one woman. In love and compassion, we must reflect God's heart on the matter and commit to fully engage those in the public arena who seek to declare "good" that which God calls "evil."

Love and the rights accorded to married couples to help them care for each other have nothing to do with any of it, of course.

Perhaps somewhat humorously, another article in that same issue of Citizen magazine advances an argument for "covenant marriage," which makes divorce more difficult for couples who enter it. In 1997, Louisiana became the first of three states to pass a covenant marriage law. (This is two years before the first civil unions were enacted in Vermont, and six years before same-gender marriage was made legal in Massachusetts.) Of the couples that are eligible for covenant marriage, which is to say all mixed-gender couples, "only 2 percent of Louisiana couples have chosen covenant marriages." Should this be taken to mean that their marriages should be taken away from them, or that nobody really needs or wants a covenant marriage? Does this indicate that covenant marriages are a mere trophy for Christian Nationalists? By the logic exhibited elsewhere in the very same Focus on the Family house organ, it does.

In a third article, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, a political lobbying organization spun off from Focus on the Family, claims that transgendered people, as well as bisexuals like myself, are proof that LGBT advocates want to undermine rather than enter marriage. "The whole movement to overturn marriage includes groups that its leaders call bisexual and transgendered persons. How could those same radical leaders deny marriage rights to a bisexual person who wants two spouses of two different sexes? How could they deny marriage rights to a man who marries a woman, but who then undergoes a sex change operation and demands the right also to marry a man? Thus, we very quickly enter into even more bizarre territory legally and socially." Wow. Here I was thinking it's hard enough to cook for one picky spouse and my house is kind of small as it is. I didn't intend for my jokes about what I would do with Tony Stewart given an opportunity to be taken as policy statements.

Truly, all I want is to stay married to one wonderful woman. Quite a few of my LGBT friends would like to get married, or to find someone worthy of marrying. None of Citizen's contributors bothered to ask me, though, or any other gay or bisexual person. As I mentioned in the first paragraphs of this article, members of what was called Generation X are the first Americans to spend any part of their youth realistically expecting that same-gender marriage might happen for us. Older LGBT people did not, and therefore didn't get to think accordingly. (If you are straight, think about the way your parents may have teasingly asked, "When's the wedding?", or the way you may have written your first name next to your boyfriend's last name to see how the combination looked.) It isn't just mainstream society that's going to have to readjust to the reality of same-gender marriage--LGBT individuals will need to readjust our thinking as well.

Furthermore, we are not the strawpeople that groups like Focus on the Family present us as being. We are real human beings with real concerns. We have economic issues, such as the inability to afford a wedding or a would-be spouse's kids or their lousy credit. We have to find the right person, too. We have conflicting ideas of where and how to live, too. We have to make adjustments to our lives and determine whether the other person is worth those adjustments, too. Those issues, not the prospect of having our new legal status yanked away from us, should be the only obstacles between same-gender couples and legal marriage.