Kirmizi_ada

California just decided to make itself into a live microphone to the rest of the world on what constitutes a legitimate public relationship, and high school students here in the Middle East don't and won't be using the term "civil unions" any time soon. The symbolic value of "marriage" is concrete and binding in this part of the world, even if the debate about nuptual terminology may seem like yet another airy culture war over there in America. On a planet where words fly from hemisphere to hemisphere faster than fighter jets, it is a rite of parochial cowardice for any state government to re-label things just because the previous label was too sacred for prime-time. If my husband or wife is a gorgeous, towering glass of pulpy-fresh juice made from orange trees that I tended, what kind of insanity would it be for me to allow them to be called Orange Drink on a government document?

What "civilunions" offend against is not one's sense of equality before the law, but rather one's perception of reality in the world and in language. (Writing it without the space demonstrates the underlying silliness.) After eight years of rhetorical violence coming out of my government, I will use the plainest, most historically accurate, and most unequivocal term for my relationship that I please until someone carts me off for it.

If queers and African Americans are going to have a sit-down about Prop 8, maybe they could start by talking about how the state has described both groups throughout the arc of their histories, how it has settled on brutal metaphors like the three-fifths compromise, how little girls grew up comparing the skin on their arm to a brown paper bag to see whether they were "dark" or "light," about how wayward sissies and farm-bred tomboys burst out of their labels only to be fed Latinate monstrosities like "domestic partnership," "civil unions", "gender dysphoria" and "sexual orientation." Maybe Black and queer people could come to some shared observations about how it feels to lie repeatedly about oneself in someone else's made-up language, just because everyone else is afraid of the words that come naturally to you and your friends.

Being precise in one's use of language has never been seen as a right, and it probably never will. It is, however, a spiritual imperative—good for the spine, shoulders, and stomach alike—one that all oppressed people deserve to insist upon. So unless California wants to be renamed Occidental Contiguity, it should get its hands off my vocabulary until death do us part.