But, you know, that old Grinch was so smart and so slick
He thought up a lie, and he thought it up quick!
"Why, my sweet little tot," the fake Shepherd sneered,
"The judges are evil, the other states weird."
"I'll fix the rings there and I'll bring them back here."
It was quarter past dawn... All the Gays, still a-bed,
all the Gays still a-snooze when he packed up and fled.
"Pooh-Pooh to the Gays!" he was grinch-ish-ly humming.
"They're finding out now no Gay Marriage is coming!"
"Their mouths will hang open a minute or two
then the Gays down in Gayville will all cry Boo-Hoo!"
He stared down at Gayville! The Grinch popped his eyes!
Then he shook! What he saw was a shocking surprise!
Every Gay down in Gayville, the tall and the small,
was kissing! Without any bennies at all!
He HADN'T stopped Marriage from coming! IT CAME!
Somehow or other, it came just the same!
And the Grinch, with his grinch-feet ice-cold in the snow,
stood puzzling and puzzling: "How could it be so?"
"It came without lawyers, no papers to sort!"
"It came without licenses, came without courts!"
And he puzzled three hours, till his puzzler was sore.
Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn't before!
"Maybe Marriage," he thought, "doesn't come from the court.
Maybe Marriage...perhaps... comes right from the heart.
Maybe Marriage comes from all the words the Gays say.
Words like Husband, like Wedding, and Spouse who is Gay."
And what happened then...? Well...in Gayville they say
that the Grinch's small brain grew three sizes that day!
And the Gays had their Weddings. They promised for life.
They swore to be faithful, to Wife and her Wife.
The Husbands were happy, to each other they vowed
To be Out and be Honest, be Gay and be Proud.
They told all their neighbors and friends of their Spouse,
They told of their Marriage and sharing their house.
They said "We got Married." They shouted it loud.
Their marital status was "Married and Proud."
And the minute his heart didn't feel quite so tight,
He whizzed with his load through the bright morning light.
And he brought back the rings, cake and Gay birdseed bags!
And he... ...HE HIMSELF... hung the Gay Rainbow Flag!
The Lord looked down, at the proud and the tall,
and said "These are my children, and I love them all."
The Moral of the Story...
The moral of this story is that we don't need a piece of paper and the approval of the state to get married. We can just get married. Instead of having a committment ceremony, we can have a wedding. Instead of partners, we can have husbands and wives. Instead of calling our relationship a Domestic Partnership or a Civil Union, we can call it a Marriage.
Whether any government recognizes it is separate from what we call it. It's a free country and we can call ourselves what we like. In 5 or 10 or 20 years, with plenty of visible same-sex married couples, the world won't see us as strange or scary, we're just the married couple down the street that happens to be gay. Eventually, the legal recognization of our marriages will follow.
If we allow ourselves to voluntarily sit in the back of the bus, we'll never make any progress. Rosa Parks had to sit in the front of the bus to make a difference. We must as well.
Copyright (c) 2004 by Mary Ann Horton.
Permission granted to copy in whole, with attribution.
This is a parody of "How the Grinch Stole
Christmas."
