I'm hard-pressed to figure out how to respond to yesterday's vote -- and boy do I miss Mattnet for its use in sharpening my thoughts. I'm pissed beyond coherence, I'm deeply disappointed in humanity, I'm not really surprised at our pettiness, and I'm feeling as if I flew in from some alternate universe to one that makes no sense.

I'm young enough that I grew up seeing a blatant truth: segregation was morally wrong. In 1997, I was shocked that just 40 years earlier, the blind hatred of blacks was so pervasive that the presence of cameras wasn't a deterrent to behavior as shown in pictures like this one, with people openly spewing invective at their fellow Americans in the streets. The hate was that deep. The behavior is so clearly, so palpably, wrong.

I cannot for the life of me see how this isn't exactly the same thing.

I hear the clamor that gay marriage threatens straight marriage. HOW? Married gay vibes penetrate walls that are impervious to unmarried gay vibes, causing a straight couple to become impotent and then divorced? Ridiculous, yes, but I honestly don't get it. I've not seen one single mechanism proposed for how gay marriage erodes others' marriages. My resulting assumption is that it's something hatemongers know causes a knee-jerk reaction and are exploiting it.

But what, exactly, are we trying to protect? What is marriage and what is its role in our society? What is it beyond a shorthand in social introductions for, "this is my lover, we're committed, we're presumed exclusive, and we're presumed to be in this until one of us dies?"

In my head, I break marriage down into two components: the societal and the personal.

Societal marriage exists to enforce child-rearing responsibilities and to strengthen the unit against outside interference. I'm thinking here of society benefitting from adequate resources being available to raise children and in society reinforcing the importance of the family bond by limiting the power of other relatives, such as in-laws, in issues of inheritance, medical decisions, and so on. Ideally, it reduces social friction because we don't hit on others' exclusive sexual partners. We've come to attach many legal duties and perks to marriage, but those are the societal goals I see as underpinning marriage.

Personal marriage has long been acknowledged in Texas as existing beyond the power of the state to declare. Common law marriage in this state can be as simple as agreeing that you're married and not objecting when introduced as the other's wife or husband. No state or church blessing required. To me, that argues a recognition of "soul mates," a bond outside the purview of either church or state.

Preventing gay people from legally marrying doesn't stop them from falling in love or building lives together or acting as a unit. The number of commitment ceremonies as well as the flood of people to San Francisco when they were suddenly granting marriage licenses argues that personal marriage exists independent of society's view. In effect, societal marriage is a formal acknowledgement of personal marriage.

So, we've now declared that gay people cannot do what they already were not allowed to do. (Lest anyone forget that Texas has never issued a marriage license to a same sex couple.) As best I can tell, the point of this vote was to declare it okay to continue to hate. To walk behind the hated Americans and scream hatred at them for daring to live normal lives.

How small we seem.