We Have a Right to Feel Special!

Since California legalized same-sex marriage, as LizardOC just mentioned in her guest post, the state has been issuing gender-neutral marriage licenses reading "Party A" and "Party B." Seems a perfectly reasonable way to accommodate both couples of opposite sexes and couples of the same sex (and, frankly, Iain and I can't be the only straight couple who thinks "bride" and "groom" are such loaded terms that they feel antiquated and vaguely oppressive). Anyway…

Naturally it doesn't matter how perfectly reasonable this minor adjustment to the California marriage license is—because if straight people only have their precious shiny heterosexuality honored on their engagement announcements, on their wedding invitations, at their wedding, at their reception, and everywhere else for the rest of their lives but not on their marriage license, then it's totally discriminatory and someone's gotta cause a stink.

"We are traditionalists – we just want to be called bride and groom," said [Rachel Bird], 25, who works part time for her father's church. "Those words have been used for generations and now they just changed them."

…"We just feel that our rights have been violated," she said.

Yeah, well, they haven't been. There's no "right to have your heterosexuality publicly recognized."

Bird and her "groom" Gideon Codding feel like their rights have been violated because they can't distinguish between "rights" and "privilege." Their right to get married is wholly intact; their privilege of being conferred that right while it is denied to others based on sexual orientation is gone. What "feels" like a loss of "rights" is actually just a desperapte insecurity about their super-special relationship losing the shimmering, golden glow that only denying marriage equality to same-sex couples conveys upon their gloriously gilded union.

Marriage really is just a contract after all. Boo hoo.

And now that it's a contract into which all couples can enter, Bird and Codding want no part of it.

Bird and Codding have refused to complete the new forms, a stand that has already cost them. Because their marriage is not registered with the state, Bird cannot sign up for Codding's medical benefits or legally take his name. They are now exploring their options, she said.

Bird's father, Doug Bird, pastor of Roseville's Abundant Life Fellowship, said he is urging couples not to sign the new marriage forms, and that he is getting some support from congregants and colleagues at local churches.

"I would encourage you to refuse to sign marriage licenses with 'Party A' and 'Party B,' " he wrote in a letter that he sent to them. "If ever there was a time for the people of the United States to stand up and let their voices be heard – this is that time."

Yeah, this is the time to stand up and be heard. Not when we started dropping bombs on a country that hadn't attacked us or planned to, not when we started torturing people, not when the economic policies of this administration started leaving millions of people with food insecurity, not when the government let an entire American city drown—but when California started calling the two people entering into a marriage contract "Party A" and "Party B." ¡Viva la Revolución!

In a just world, this would put paid the lie that it's gays who are after the "special rights."

[H/T to Shaker ScottRS, who got it from PZ.]