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Wow, so does this mean everything you write reflects Time Inc's opinion? Or do you perhaps have some sort of standard disclaimer to the effect that it doesn't?
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An experiment for a column I wrote about blogging back in December 2001. All these years later, I haven't been able to kick the habit.
If it's called Daily Blah, how come you don't ... hey, wait, you're writing every day!
See? Told you I'd try harder.
Mister, you talk funny. Are you one of them furrners?
Why yes I am, as it happens. I was born, raised and educated in Great Britain. I've been living in the U.S. since 1996 and identify as British.
I say, old chap, you forgot the "u" in "colour."
No I didn't. I may identify as British, but I am also an American journalist writing for an American audience about mostly American issues. These two different sides of me are a constant source of tension. Nevertheless, Daily Blah will adhere to American English grammar and spelling.
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Daily Blah for... Sunday, March 14, 2004
Going Dutch
For those of you who might be wondering, the translation of the comment at the end of the last blog -- from some bloke in Brazil -- is "Oi? This is very legal here." Which is strange, because I'd never heard of gay marriage being legal in Brazil. As far as I knew, the Netherlands was the only country in the world with legalized same-sex marriage. And according to this UPI story, it hasn't exactly caused a civilization-destroying flood of weddings. "there are about 50,000 same-sex couples in the Netherlands, of whom less than 10 percent have married [since the April 2001 legalization]," says the Dutch government.
I wonder what would happen if you mapped that statistic on to certain other Western countries? What paltry potential number of weddings would make them consider modifying their Constitution, their sacred founding document?
Do the math: The population of the Netherlands is around 16 million. The population of the US is currently estimated at 292,799,516 human souls (or at least it was at 11:07pm Pacific time Sunday night, according to this amusingly precise population clock from the US Census Bureau; the same page tells us the country is sucking in an international migrant every 24 seconds, which makes me feel like a very small part of a very large historical force). But let's make the sum easier and round it up to 293 million. What's 200,484 people between friends? So the US is larger than the Netherlands by a factor of about 18. Assuming American gays pair off with the same frequency as the Dutch (a huge overestimate, given the amount of closets in certain parts of this country) we're talking about a maximum base of 900,000 couples. And assuming that they want to marry as much as the Dutch, that means 9,000 gay couples would have been married over the last three years. Ah, you might say, but San Francisco managed to marry 3,500 couples in the space of a month. Yes, but that tapped into a vast groundswell of committed unions, most of whom were married in their minds already and live in the world capital of gay culture.
Still, it's a fair point, so let's double the estimate. Hell, let's triple it. Let's say Wedstock becomes this vast sea of never-ending happily-ever-afters starring utterly uncloseted gays sprinting two by two down to their nearest City Hall in a fantasy America with uniformly Utopian levels of tolerance in every state. We're still only talking about 27,000 weddings over three years. Or 9,000 a year. There are two and a half million heterosexual marriages in the US every year. To put it in language the average Joe in a sports bar can understand, The Hets would outscore The Homos by at least 277 to 1.
So all those rabid Hets fans would get all the assurance they seem to need: that their way of life is more popular, more sanctified, immune to attack, however they want to frame it. All we're asking, the more tolerant among us, is that the other team get to play the game. Ten straight Americans get married every minute of the year, if you average it out. Don't you think we have space for one non-standard marital union every hour? Or to put it another way, one gay wedding for every 150 legal migrants?
Ahem. I seem to have been carried away by that beguiling muse, comparative statistics. What was I going to say? Ah yes, Brazil. That same UPI story confirms that gay marriage is still illegal there, which means my Rio correspondent must either be confused about his country's laws or have a shaky understanding of what I was writing about. President da Silva is apparently sympathetic to gay causes; but let's face it, he's no Gavin Newsom. The tolerance of Sao Paulo notwithstanding, we are talking about a country where 132 people get killed every year just for being gay. That's like a Madrid train bombing once a year. Funny how Washington never declares a War on Hate, isn't it? Oi indeed.
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