Does a Gay Marriage Mean a Better Wedding?

In the September issue of Vanity Fair, columnist A. A. Gill takes a flippantly askew look at the marriage equality debate by focusing his attention on the actual weddings themselves. "They are desperate for a fairy makeover," he says. "We heteros should be begging gays to come and give the best day of our lives a dressing-down by joining in."

For the most part, Gill makes similar well-meaning observations about the fight for gay marriage that would sound right at home in a late-night talk-show monologue: “The really radical-right, hair-shirt-and-burning-torches thing would be to insist that gays get married because, without wanting to be indelicate, all the stuff that gets the religiously intense so book-thumpingly incandescent about homosexuality is all the stuff that goes on before you’re married. If you want to stop them having fun up against walls and behind sofas, just let them get married.” It’s endearing, like when Whoopi Goldberg repeats, “If you don’t like gay marriage, don’t marry a gay person” on The View.

Sometimes, however, he manages to make a strong point without the sass: “Gays have always been able to marry before God. The problem has never been God; the problem is the rest of us, and that simply comes down to equality. You can’t be a little bit equal. Equality is an all-or-nothing deal. An equal right to be married before the law must be both equal and a right, without favor. It must be color-blind, and it must be gender-neutral. A lack of heterosexuality can’t disqualify a civil right, just as a lack of hair or not understanding the rules of baseball do not.”

The author does drop the bouquet when he tries to make the point, as satirical and tongue-in-cheek as it might be, that gay weddings will be naturally be snazzier than the “spectacles” put together by straight couples: “When gays remake weddings, the lighting will be the first thing to improve. Secondly, no one’s going to think that a fatless steak fryer is a suitable present, and the flowers won’t look ordered for a clown’s funeral. The music will also be classier; you won’t have to walk down the aisle to Meatloaf singing, 'I would do anything for love / But I won’t do that.'"

Besides the fact that a guest list of one's extended family doesn't get any smarter or classier for gay nuptials, does Mr. Gill really think that straight folks, even in America’s smallest towns, are actually the ones planning their weddings? David Tutera, please slap some sense into him with a fresh-cut calla lily.