A beautiful evolution...
I am voraciously reading Attack on Titan fanfiction right now. Erwin/Levi is my new OTP. As I am reading, I see something that makes me nostalgic.
In many fics, Erwin and Levi get married. It's no big deal, no human rights issues involved, no protestors, no court rulings. It's treated as naturally as a man and a woman getting married.
When I wrote "Coming Clean," a big point of contention was that Kurama and Hiei were not legally allowed to marry because they were both male. In "Bugs" this theme carried through. But I remember a specific time, while writing Kurama and Hiei exchanging promises of fidelity in "Coming Clean," when I thought to myself that some day someone would read this story in an old archive and not understand why our boys couldn't get legally married. That reader would wonder what the big deal was, and it would seem so ridiculous and unimaginable to them that such a restriction would exist, that they'd have to look it up to see if it was true. I smiled when I thought of that time, and hoped it would be in my lifetime.
And now I see that time coming to fruition. Massachusetts has allowed same sex marriage laws for almost ten years now. By legislation or court order, over half the states in the US must recognize the marriage of two men or two women. I saw my own state, New Jersey, adopt a civil union policy, which was forward-thinking at the time, to guarantee marital protections and benefits to same sex couples, and then I saw that once progressive policy become outdated and ineffective, finally to be replaced by true marriage equality allowing anyone to marry anyone they choose.
Attitudes and personal beliefs are not as easy to sway as making laws (which isn't easy, either). And I do believe that people have the right to hold their own opinions and systems of values (just not to limit the rights of others based on those personal factors). But we're getting there. We are truly getting there.
I think back to that day I wrote the scene in "Coming Clean," and my hope that someday the idea of limited marriage would be so outrageous that my own story wouldn't make sense anymore. And I see that very path unfolding around me. And it's beautiful.
I do not think this is the last civil rights fight or the final frontier of human rights. We have not figured out the next frontier, but there will always be one. For that, I am actually glad. When we run out of ways to improve the treatment of our fellow man, we run out of our own humanity. But that is neither here nor now. For now, I'm just basking in the turning tides of marriage equality and looking oirward to growing old as one of the fuddy-duddies that remembers when we were so backwards, we thought plumbing dictated love.
In many fics, Erwin and Levi get married. It's no big deal, no human rights issues involved, no protestors, no court rulings. It's treated as naturally as a man and a woman getting married.
When I wrote "Coming Clean," a big point of contention was that Kurama and Hiei were not legally allowed to marry because they were both male. In "Bugs" this theme carried through. But I remember a specific time, while writing Kurama and Hiei exchanging promises of fidelity in "Coming Clean," when I thought to myself that some day someone would read this story in an old archive and not understand why our boys couldn't get legally married. That reader would wonder what the big deal was, and it would seem so ridiculous and unimaginable to them that such a restriction would exist, that they'd have to look it up to see if it was true. I smiled when I thought of that time, and hoped it would be in my lifetime.
And now I see that time coming to fruition. Massachusetts has allowed same sex marriage laws for almost ten years now. By legislation or court order, over half the states in the US must recognize the marriage of two men or two women. I saw my own state, New Jersey, adopt a civil union policy, which was forward-thinking at the time, to guarantee marital protections and benefits to same sex couples, and then I saw that once progressive policy become outdated and ineffective, finally to be replaced by true marriage equality allowing anyone to marry anyone they choose.
Attitudes and personal beliefs are not as easy to sway as making laws (which isn't easy, either). And I do believe that people have the right to hold their own opinions and systems of values (just not to limit the rights of others based on those personal factors). But we're getting there. We are truly getting there.
I think back to that day I wrote the scene in "Coming Clean," and my hope that someday the idea of limited marriage would be so outrageous that my own story wouldn't make sense anymore. And I see that very path unfolding around me. And it's beautiful.
I do not think this is the last civil rights fight or the final frontier of human rights. We have not figured out the next frontier, but there will always be one. For that, I am actually glad. When we run out of ways to improve the treatment of our fellow man, we run out of our own humanity. But that is neither here nor now. For now, I'm just basking in the turning tides of marriage equality and looking oirward to growing old as one of the fuddy-duddies that remembers when we were so backwards, we thought plumbing dictated love.