Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes
Well, marriage doesn't function in the way it used to in terms of deciding our fate, but it's in our heads, and it determines a lot of our actions. Like, right now, if you think about gay marriage - and they just started having the first gay marriages in New York - it shows what a potent idea marriage remains for people.
Eugenides, Jeffrey. "The Art of Fiction No. 215." Interview by James Gibbons. The Paris Review, no. 215, Winter 2011.
The character was a minister performing a marriage during the 2005 controversy over gay marriage.
There was a national debate ongoing regarding whether two members of the same sex might marry. The Constitutions of several states prohibited discrimination against anyone including gays so that the courts in some cases were called upon to rule on the constitutionality of prohibitions against gay marriage. While nationally, the majority of the people were then opposed to gay marriage, in some states (including Kansas), the majority was vehemently opposed. The American Constitutional system and tradition, almost uniquely protects the rights of minorities from the “tyranny of the majority.” When the Supreme Court ruled that schools must be racially integrated, the majority of the country might have preferred a certain degree of racial discrimination. Brownback on this issue called for the will of the majority to prevail over the minority rights of teh Constitution, but on a woman’s right to abortion which was favored by the majority of Americans, he opposed the tyranny of the majority. The issue politically almost always comes down to "whose ox is gored." A decade later, with a generational shift, the vast majority of Americans suported same sex marriage and the majority of the states legalized and Browbak then claimed the right of the minority (States like Kansas) to not be forced the recognize the marriages that the will of the majority had allowed.
Cheney had an openly gay daughter. However, when the issue of gay marriage arose in 2004, President Bush came out strongly against it forcing Cheney to flip-flop to support his President. Later, in 2004, he went back to a more nuanced explanation stating that this was his personal belief, but his President had decided otherwise and as Vice President he would support the President, but still held a contrary personal view.
Earlier, he had opposed same sex marriage, but as the population as a whole had a change of mind on this issue, so did he. By 2013, 16 States had modified their laws to allow gay marriage.
Jeffrey Kent Eugenides is an American novelist and short story writer. He has written numerous short stories and essays, as well as three novels: The Virgin Suicides (1993), Middlesex (2002), and The Marriage Plot (2011). The Virgin Suicides served as the basis of a feature film, while Middlesex received the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in addition to being a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the International Dublin Literary Award, and France's Prix Médicis.
