GLAAD PRESIDENT DIVORCING HUSBAND

GLAAD President Jarret Barrios opens up to Boston Globe about divorce:

I was one of the first elected officials in the country to marry his same-sex partner. In part because there were so many naysayers, we worked to be a model couple — with each of us trying be the perfect husband. Like other lesbian and gay couples, we hoped to show our relationships for what they are: loving partnerships that deserve the possibility of “happily ever after” that marriage promises.

But as our families continue the march towards equality, the gay and lesbian community often doesn’t talk about divorce, even though some of the most important protections associated with marriage are exercised at the end of a relationship — protections that help the more economically vulnerable partner, give a formula for sharing the care of the children, and establish how two people can disentangle a life’s worth of acquisitions, compromises, and dreams.

Just as gay and lesbian couples share the joys of marriage, we will share the pain of divorce, something for which we have no template. Divorce plumbs impossible depths of sadness. It involves separating the dishes and the books and all the other things you acquired back when you both still felt the lightness of love, asserting to a judge at a public trial that, yes, your marriage has broken down irretrievably, and telling your parents whose marriage of 47 years hangs heavy over your anemic explanations to them.

Avalon's thoughts: This is what annoys me about politigays. It seems in order to get their agenda's pushed before congress, they condemn those who don't believe what they believe, and those who aren't ashamed to be promiscuous and not live by the rules of those in power. Heterosexuals do the same thing. People get married because they have a child on the way, and it's un-christianlike to have a baby out of wedlock, or for whatever other political reason there may be. I thought marriage, besides it being a piece of paper that guarantees you certain rights was supposed to be between two people who love each other, yet people continue to get married for all the wrong reasons. I'm not saying Jarret didn't love his husband, but like Melissa Etheridge and Tammy Lynn is seems gays want to get married because it's chic or it's to give the finger to uber religious straights who disapprove of their way of life. Being in love and getting married, the only person you have to prove your love to is who you lay down in bed with every night because at the end of the day, all those naysayers aren't living with you so fuck their opinion and what they have to say. I believe everyone has the right to get married, and I hope that day does come. But I do hope that those who don't live by the boring rules that the politigays have bestowed upon the entire community just so political homophobes won't deny our rights, won't get bashed for their opposing beliefs. Not everyone believes in marriage or monogamy, and that's ok. Just like not everyone doesn't believe in marriage. I do hope that people can get married for all the right reasons and think it through before they take such a big stepm, otherwise, divorce will continue to climb.