I'm a 26-year old man madly in love with my 25-year old boyfriend. We've been dating since September. He's just about perfect in my book. However, an old issue resurfaced recently that I thought had resolved itself in a previous conversation: he doesn't think gay marriage is important if civil unions are available with all of the same rights. Of course there is a fundamental difference between the two terms and the fact that there is one right missing from civil unions: the right to have that relationship legally honored and respected as a marriage and not as something different and inferior.

After hours of heated debate, I told him I would drop the subject for now. I summed up by saying I was hurt that he thought we were unworthy of the word and that my hope was that one day I would help him realize the importance of having the word marriage attached to same-sex relationships. But, it's hard. It's hard to be with someone who thinks being unequal is OK. He comes from a conservative Christian background and I come from a liberal Catholic community. I understand it might take time, but it's hard.

I keep coming back to the word hard because he makes me hard. So, to make this a little more fun, what hot talking points can I use to make him realize why gay marriage is important when I'm busy pounding his amazing ass?

Needing A Sexy Argument

My response after the jump...

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Keep fucking that ass, NASA, because sooner or later you're likely to fuck some sense into it. Have a little faith that your gay boyfriend, like most straight Americans, will come around on this issue. And I'm thinkin' he'll come around faster with you up his ass than without. Remember: he's only 25, he's from a batshit background (our Catholic background is batshit too, NASA, but a fundy background is batshittier), and he may not have thought too deeply about this issue. He may also hope to keep the peace with his family by adopting the "compromise" position on rights for same-sex couples—marriage for them, civil unions for us—but he'll soon see that it's his position that's compromised.

Conservatives who oppose same-sex marriage also oppose civil unions. Here's a current example: the state legislature in Hawaii passed a bill this spring that would create civil unions for same-sex couples in that state. Well, that's what the bill will do if Hawaii's Republican governor signs it into law. But last week Gov. Linda Lingle placed Hawaii's civil unions bill on her veto list and religious conservatives—the folks civil unions were supposedly crafted to mollify—are raising holy hell, lobbying Lingle furiously, and demanding that the governor make good on her threat to veto the bill. Hell, Minnesota's "moderate" Republican governor, Tim Pawlenty—remember: he's a "moderate" Republican—just vetoed a bill that would've allowed a gay person to make funeral arrangements for his deceased partner because that somehow threatened "traditional marriage." (Straight people: are you seriously going to stop marrying each other if we can bury each other?)

Civil unions are a nice compromise in theory. But in practice it's simply not possible to compromise with people who aren't willing to, you know, compromise.

And more importantly: civil unions are an unworkable compromise. States that have created separate-but-in-theory-equal civil unions for same-sex couples quickly discovered that civil unions don't work.

Finally, NASA, Jonathan Rauch's book, Evan Wolfson's book, and Andrew Sullivan's book all make lovely gifts, and your one-year anniversary is coming up at the end of the summer...