Wedding cakes and petitions

Valentine's Day was decidedly anticlimactic this year. "It's a Hallmark Holiday," all those singles sites on the Internet say, but they're bitter and they lie. It's really just one of those holidays that makes you feel more anti-social than you already do after spending your entire weekend in your common room writing enough cover letters to fill a U-Haul and having little to no human contact, especially the kind that you want. But I digress.

I left my room once on Saturday. It wasn't a good day for my social life. Sadly, February 12 should have been a very good day. It happens to be both Abraham Lincoln's birthday and the kickoff to Freedom to Marry Week. More importantly, however, February 12 falls midway between one of my favorite TV shows, Wife Swap, and my favorite holiday to eat chocolate-covered cherries.

Anyone who saw Wife Swap last Wednesday, though, might have thought that it wasn't such a good day. A recap, for those of you who have lives on Wednesday nights. Wife Swap is a program where two very different families from very different backgrounds swap wives for two weeks. In the old days this was called swinging. Now it's just called reality television.

On last week's Wife Swap, a socially conservative interracial family from Texas swapped a wife with a lesbian couple from Tucson. Normally at the end of the two-week period, the families say what they learned and agree that the experience was worthwhile. Not the case last week. After being called "depraved" and "despicable" by conservative mom Kris, Kristine, one of the Arizona moms, said "I was very foolish and na?ve to do something like this. ... Now I do believe that some people are truly cruel, and unfortunately, I will never forget."

Alex Perkins, a junior in the College, heard about the episode and also won't be forgetting it for a long time. After seeing clips of the show, he said he "wanted to throw stuff at the television because of things [the conservative mom] said" to her new partner.

The fact that the conservative couple was an interracial couple was even more inflammatory for me because I kept thinking back to the fact that interracial marriages were illegal in Texas until 1967. Alex agreed. "The fact that [the conservative rhetoric] was enough to bring the same-sex couple to tears --you would think that people that have experienced intolerance in the past would have sympathy for those who are going through it now," he remarked.

Angela Woodall, a sophomore in the College, also agrees but thinks that the episode will provoke debate. "As bad as it was for the couple themselves, it overall brought national attention to the hatred against LGBT people and same-sex couples in a way that it is just not fair," she said. "They deserve the same chance that any other family might have in this chaotic world."

After watching last week's episode, I wished that it wasn't a reality TV show. I wished that in fact, it was a poorly written storyline for a Lifetime TV show. But I think, like Angela said, that there's a positive message to be gained from watching discrimination. It's a wake-up call to get involved.

Luckily, because of ALLIES, I don't have to look far on campus this week to get involved.

This week is Freedom to Marry Week, which "not only raises awareness about why same-sex couples should have the right to marry, but also to raise awareness that gay couples should have the same rights that everyone else is able to have" says Kathy Totoki, a junior in the College and the ALLIES Member-at-Large.

Today from 11-4 there will be wedding cakes and petitions in Houston Hall. Please sign. Somehow it seems more climactic than a Hallmark card.

Melody Joy Kramer is a junior English major from Cherry Hill, N.J. Perpendicular Harmony appears on Wednesdays.

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