By Chloe Angyal • @chloeangyal • 13 years ago

Jewish mothers lobby for right to nag all their kids about getting married

Even the gay ones. This lovely ad from New Yorkers United for Marriage stars the Blumenthals, a New York couple who have one straight son, who is married, and one gay son, who is not legally allowed to get married. And the Blumenthals want to change this. Because Jewish mothers like to bug their kids about hurrying up and getting married and giving me some grandchildren already before I die because I’m not going to be around forever you know my health isn’t what it used to be, and right now the New York state legislature is standing in the way of that. Despite new data from Quinnipiac showing 58% of New Yorkers support same sex marriage.


Iris Blumenthal: We’ve been married for forty-seven years and have two sons. Our older son is straight and has been married for fifteen years. Our youngest son is gay and has been in a committed relationship for eleven years. A good marriage is thinking about and caring for the other person even more than you care about yourself and we’ve seen this in Jonathan and Eric’s relationship to each other. They’re a wonderful couple, they’re a caring couple. It would give us such great joy to walk them down the aisle and watch them get married.

Pam’s House Blend reports that the ad will be running statewide starting this week, so if you’re a New Yorker, keep a look out. New Yorkers United for Marriage will also be sending out mailers with a tear off “reply” card, as for a wedding, for New Yorkers to send to their legislators, so when you get yours in the mail, be sure to sign it and send it off!

New York, NY

Chloe Angyal is a journalist and scholar of popular culture from Sydney, Australia. She joined the Feministing team in 2009. Her writing about politics and popular culture has been published in The Atlantic, The Guardian, New York magazine, Reuters, The LA Times and many other outlets in the US, Australia, UK, and France. She makes regular appearances on radio and television in the US and Australia. She has an AB in Sociology from Princeton University and a PhD in Arts and Media from the University of New South Wales. Her academic work focuses on Hollywood romantic comedies; her doctoral thesis was about how the genre depicts gender, sex, and power, and grew out of a series she wrote for Feministing, the Feministing Rom Com Review. Chloe is a Senior Facilitator at The OpEd Project and a Senior Advisor to The Harry Potter Alliance. You can read more of her writing at chloesangyal.com

Chloe Angyal is a journalist and scholar of popular culture from Sydney, Australia.

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