I agree with your blog. We know that there are many people who did as much as my wife did that night and didn’t have the resources or the education or the sympathetic ear of the media to fight it.

Someone asked me if I was going to wear a suit to court. I said ‘Why? Does that mean I’m more likely to get justice for my family than a guy wearing dirty pants?’

What happened to my wife and family was wrong.

The world cried out about the police trespass against my family as if it were a trespass on their own family.

They helped us to win a tiny little bit of justice on March 13th.

As a man, a father, a husband… I am humbled by the words, the prayers and the offers of supports of millions of faceless strangers. I owe them a debt of gratitude I could never repay.

For that moment in the parking lot that my family felt so alone in the violation by the police, we walked into that courthouse with the well wishes of so many.

My promise to you is this:

My name is Tim Janecyk

I would fight as hard for justice for your family as I did for mine.

No family, regardless of race, creed, economic or educational background deserves what happened to my family.

That’s why we fought this.

Your voices helped us beat them.

I asked these questions of a gay couple - Why, for Christ’s sake, do you care to emulate the choreographies of the heterosexual establishment? What do you care whether the conformities of straightdom are extended to your relationship? Why the hell do you aspire to a construct that was forged in a faith system that has denied your sexuality for several hundred years? If you proclaim your homosexuality so proudly, why do you want to be included in the terms of this hetero game?

Honestly, I couldn’t see what it was for. I’m all for gay people being included in society - but inclusion implies influence. And the way the game’s set up, all the rules and the positions and the plays were put in place by heterosexuals. That doesn’t mean that the game is good or bad - but it ought to mean, surely, that empowered and interested gays are unlikely to find everything they need in that preconceived model.

So - I put that argument to my gay friends. Pretty watertight, I thought. Pretty rigorous.

They laughed at me.

My argument, they said, was logically and philosohically sound. Very difficult, they opined, to touch it from a purely theoretical basis.

But - they said - it was also very European. They pointed out that I come from the UK - where health care is provided by the state, free at the point of delivery. Not so in the States. People in the States, they said, will take a job not because they like the firm nor because they love the pay nor even because it’s what they want to do - they’ll take it for the health plan. In the US, people will take and stick with a job they despise because they cannot afford to provide health cover for their family without it.

And so - by extension of that argument - if gay marriage is recognised, then occupational health cover will take care of both partners. Without gay marriage as an established societal construct, partners will be denied health care. Adopted children will be not be treated. And - just to push it a bit - wills may not be enforceable for gay partners. Tax breaks will not be broadly available to gays in de facto marriages. Without the official recognistion of gay marriage, the benefits of committed love will not gnerally be available to gay people

So - I was forcibly informed - that very practical, untheoretical, concrete reality was enough to drive the demand for the recognition of gay marriage in the US. It wasn’t an abstract ethical argument. It was a pragmatic and very hands-on problem.

In which case, yeah. I see the point.

But still, the impractical and morally logical and - yeah, okay - liberal European part of me still thinks that it would be better to burn the house down than to demand both a begrudged seat at the table and also a damp,chilly room to sleep in after the pudding’s been shared out. I think in the end it would be better to build yoiur own house in the neighbourhood than to squat where there’s an existing space and demand your right to stay.