I realized recently that I was, in fact, not in good hands with Allstate. Okay, fine, I’m not here to impugn the quality of the Hands, but the fact is those Hands were costing me about a half a bill more a month than almost everyone I know. This after the fact that for the last three or four years – basically since I realized at one point that if anything happened to my car I’d be oh so fucked zOMG because there’s no replacing my car, there’s having the car I have and not having a car – I drive like an old lady. I go the speed limit, I always buckle up, and while I do have stored within my body roughly the amount of road rage that’s present on, say, the Triborough Bridge at any given moment, I haven’t had a ticket in over three years. And that ticket was a seat belt citation. I honestly could not tell you the last time I got pulled over for speeding.

And yet – here I am paying half again for car insurance what everyone else I know is. File under, Chump.

Brian has a friend who’s an insurance agent, and today he called him for me. The guy quoted me a more reasonable price for car insurance but also mentioned to Brian that, should, say our house burn down (not entirely unthinkable since our house was built in 1941, we live next to this, and this occasionally happens in our neighborhood, and oh yeah, all those tornadoes Oklahoma’s famous for), nothing of mine would be covered. So our wonderful insurance agent suggested I get a renters’ policy to cover me in the event of a disaster.

So fine, I did it. I’m still saving about $50 a month AND I have an insurance agent I actually trust for once. So that’s a plus. But it went all over me – a renter in my own home.

Do you know who doesn’t have to be a renter in their own home? Straight married couples, that’s who. If Brian and I were legally married, crap like this wouldn’t matter. We could visit each other in the hospital without having to spend thousands on legal fees drawing up paperwork saying we can visit each other in the hospital. If one of us died the whole insurance and inheritance thing would be much, much easier than it is now – we have to pay the aforementioned legal fees and do mountains of paperwork just to loosely codify something that married people get the instant their marriage license is filed. Legally, we’re strangers.

I wish that the people who oppose gay marriage could understand the way I’m feeling right now. It’s a rancid stew of so many negative emotions, of unwantedness and exclusion and passive aggression and not being a fully included or valued member of my society. I’m a renter in my own freaking house. I wonder what Jesus would say about that. I wonder if that’s a metaphor for the larger situation. I wonder if people who have such strong opposing views to mine would take a moment and try to see this from my point of view, for just a second. At the very least I hope you’ll hold back and understand I’m hurting enough. Maybe now’s not the time to pile on with your little opinions about something you don’t know anything about.

Whatever, man. I really hate playing the aggrieved minority. But I have to say that if you’re straight – especially if you’re married – you have it so easy and you don’t even know it. It’s like being rich that way – it’s hard to understand how much easier your life is unless you’re on the outside. And here we are living next door to you or down the street or hiding within your families and churches and feeling invisible and left out and unwanted. So you should think real hard about that and wonder if that’s the witness you want.