Marriage and apathy in the Garden State

Two weeks ago Thursday, the New Jersey State Senate voted down a bill that would have legalized same-sex marriage in the state. I was there, in the statehouse, and could only shrug in disappointment as the expected outcome (20-14 against) popped up on the television screen in the overflow room, where a few hundred citizens were gathered. Fifteen minutes later I was in my car heading home.

It had been a long day and I was tired. My friends and I had been in Trenton since nine (the vote took place around five in the afternoon) trying to stalk down and sway the mind of our supposedly on-the-fence state senator. Around noon I caught up to him as he exited his office through the “secret” back door and told him a heartbreaking half-truth about a gay friend of mine who wanted to get married but couldn’t. He was like an older brother to me, and I wanted to be the best man at his wedding, I told the senator. “Thank you for sharing that story,” he said.

The truth is, that friend isn’t from New Jersey, I have no idea if he wants to marry his boyfriend, and I certainly won’t be his best man if he does get married. I lied because we had been instructed upon arrival at the statehouse to think of why we were there fighting for marriage equality—this “why” (preferably a personal anecdote) was what we were supposed to relate to the senator—and I had been stumped. Or rather, personal motivations were virtually non-existent: I’m not gay, I won’t be getting married anytime soon, and there is nobody close to me who would have been directly affected by the bill. Most of my friends who made the trip with me shared similar feelings. So why, then, were we there?

After a little conversation on the topic, the answer, unimpressive though it was, became clear—marriage equality just seemed like common sense to us. It was the “right thing,” so when one of our more active friends asked us if we would help convince our senator to do the right thing, we didn’t think twice (well OK, when my alarm rang at the ungodly hour of 7 a.m. I may have had my doubts, but I swear I didn’t think three times).

Oddly enough, though, when asked by an older member of the New Jersey-based gay rights organization Garden State Equality—a person who was apparently a veteran of the mass protests of the ’60s and ’70s—why my generation hadn’t come out in droves to fight for the bill, it occurred to me that the reason my friends had named for being there was similar to the reason so many others had stayed home. That is, the importance of marriage equality was so obvious to us that the notion of an all-out war over the issue was absurd. It was, no doubt, a view fostered in a sheltered, affluent, and liberal New Jersey suburb, but was nonetheless true for many of the kids we knew. Indeed, I feel pretty confident that I would never have ended up in Trenton had it not been for that friend suggesting I come.

That is not to say that I had anything more important to do that day, but rather that it would hardly have occurred to me to make the trip. Why is that? To a great extent, I think it’s because we, as an age group, are uniquely self-absorbed. I don’t mean that as a pejorative. Self-absorption is the best part, and perhaps a necessary part, of being young—try “finding yourself” when you spend half your day looking for your daughter’s shoes so she can get to school on time. But it does mean that the external world can often seem like an afterthought. We can be absolutely convinced that marriage equality is the right thing, and at the same time be too caught up in work or relationships or “Spicy Specials” to help make it a reality.

It is exactly this sort of obsession with trifles that represents what the old-timer from GSE called the apathy of the younger generations. And at first I agreed with him. Apathy, bred from self-absorption, has always been one of those negative words thrown around in discussing our generation.

But then it occurred to me that this apathy was actually the greatest thing for the bill. After all, a state full of citizens who couldn’t care less whether or not two adults of the same sex could marry each other was precisely the sort of state where such a bill would be successful. In that sense, one lesson of the marriage equality bill was a bright spot in a sad defeat—the people of New Jersey (or the young ones, anyway), don’t care if their state offers same-sex marriage. I would venture to say that the same is true of the youth in many other states, though I am not so naïve as to think that the opinions of Jersey residents extend to the entire country. Still, advocates for same-sex marriage should perhaps take heart, and even be encouraged by the apathy so friendly to their cause.

Neil FitzPatrick is a Columbia College sophomore. Excuses and Half-truths runs alternate Tuesdays.