I am writing this after the passage of yet another election-year round of gay marriage bans, to see if it is possible to communicate beyond sound bites and doomsday scenarios with those of you who voted to ban gay marriage in California and elsewhere around the country. Obviously I am not a disinterested party, and like many gays and lesbians around the country, I am trying to understand how full marriage rights for me somehow threatens you. To say that I am outraged would be an understatement. But outrage and anger are getting us nowhere. Can we perhaps have a dialogue about this? My hope is that people on both sides of this issue will comment here so that we can cut through some of the outright dishonesty of a political campaign and have a reasonable discussion of the issue. I will say right from the start that I am not interested in discussing injunctions from holy books of any kind. Not only do these texts debase gay people as human beings, but they also contain many rules and regulations that are summarily ignored unless they are politically expedient. I’m sure you can find other forums if you absolutely must discuss Leviticus.
To start this conversation here’s a little about me. I am a medical librarian living in Austin Texas. I have been in a loving, committed relationship with my partner for twenty years. Because we live in Austin, where gays and lesbians are accepted as opposed to tolerated or shunned as we are in other areas of the state, we were able to register as domestic partners at our City Hall. Still, in order to have some of the same rights as married couples, we had to hire an attorney at a fairly hefty financial cost to draw up documents dealing with such things as rights of survivorship, durable power of attorney and other issues (these are some of the legal relationships automatically conferred by a civil marriage). We cherish each other and our relationship and the public repudiation that has occurred around the country in the past four years as voters in state after state have decided to place restrictive definitions of marriage into state constitutions has been a true slap in the face. Yes gay people are angry, but what do you expect – our relationships are cheapened and we are treated like national scapegoats, such a serious threat to the heterosexual marriage that national and state laws must be passed to restrict us and constitutional documents must be amended as well. I think that our rallies and demonstrations are important and am glad they will continue and I will participate in them. Our rights are not negotiable. But I also think that we need to speak to each other, and I am hoping with this post that some of that anger can be channeled into dialogue, hopefully a constructive dialogue.
I would be interested in knowing how a legal recognition of my twenty-year relationship threatens you. Given the fact that heterosexuals can marry after knowing each other for a few days or less, how does recognition of a week-old gay/lesbian relationship threaten you? It appears to me that heterosexual marriage is here to stay. After all, there are many more straight people than gay people, and none of my gay/lesbian friends are determined to ban, degrade or destroy your marriages/families. Would that you were as accepting of us as we are of you. Apparently, divorce is more of a threat to your marriages than gay unions, yet you are clearly reluctant to attack divorce with the same vehemence you use against our relationships.
The campaign against gay marriage featured the following time-tested accusations and arguments:
- Homosexuals are trying to teach children about gay sexual activity since some schools purchased books with pictures of children with two mothers/fathers. These books are described as teaching children about sexual behavior because in the eyes of many anything having to do with gays and lesbians is absolutely about sex. This is how picture books for children depicting a different kind of nuclear family morph into sex manuals. This, of course, is not the case with similar books with pictures of heterosexual parents and their children. Nobody would dare to presume that such innocent drawings teach young children about sex.
- Homosexuals are trying to force religious institutions to perform gay weddings. The fight for civil recognition of gay relationships has nothing to do with religion. The thousands of marriages that occurred in California were civil ceremonies that took place in government buildings. Churches were not forced to wed gay people. Yes, there are some denominations that have decided, in the spirit of inclusion, to perform gay unions. But nobody is trying to force your church to do the same thing. We know where we are welcome, and where we are not.
- Activist judges on the California Supreme Court ignored democratic principles by thwarting the will of the people on the gay marriage issue. I question the wisdom of amending state constitutions via ballot initiatives, especially in a country where the founders made it extremely difficult to amend the US Constitution for fear that the whims of majorities might debase the document. We do live in a Constitutional Republic, where the rights of minorities are to be protected from majority rule. You can rail all you want about activist judges, but in addition to interpreting the Constitution they are supposed to protect minority rights.
-Gay/lesbian rights are not civil rights. We may never agree on whether the fight for rights for sexual minorities is a legitimate civil rights movement. But you can’t deny that gays and lesbians have been vilified, attacked and murdered because of our sexual orientation. Maybe you think being gay/lesbian (or any other sexual minority) is weird, strange, sick, whatever. But perhaps you can relate to being bashed for what other people think of you, or for being too loud, too militant, too pushy with your demands for rights.
You may disagree with the points I have made above, but maybe we can talk about it. So which of the previous arguments persuaded you to vote for Proposition 8 in California, or for any other anti-gay ballot initiative? Would you have hesitated if your neighbor, or a co-worker, or a relative had told you they were gay? Would that have made a difference to you? Are there any gays and lesbians reading this who have recently come out to someone you weren’t sure you should tell? What kind of reaction did you get? Do you think that might have kept someone from voting for a gay marriage ban? I hope you will comment so that we can begin talking to rather than past each other.
What this national conversation desperately needs is a reality check. “1,138 rights” is quite cerebral. “Not receiving your spouse’s pension after a 20 year marriage” is devastating, esp. immediately following the trauma of her death.
We need to spend a bit more time acknowledging what occurs when those 1,138 rights and protections are NOT in place for individuals. Cruel, often inhuman suffering. Unnessary suffering. Preventable suffering.
Unfortunately those most hurt by Marriage Inequality cannot or will not share their stories; their souls are often too broken to speak. Or things like shame or the closet keep them mute. I personally CANNOT follow U.S. tax law when U.S. laws do not even include myself or my family. [Equality Tax Protest]
Your attempt to begin a dialogue with your opponents is laudable. I doubt very many will take you up on your offer; they’re too busy speaking from the shrill position of fear and hatred. But maybe I’m being too cynical. Maybe something constructive will come of this. Good luck!
Agreed, being specific about how the marriage bans impact our families is important. In California, too many focus-group tested messages were used, as opposed to real LGBT people telling their stories. The new movie “Milk” shows that we should have learned this during the Briggs Initiative in 1978.
You can share stories from Massachusetts by sharing a copy of Courting Equality, the story of how we won same-sex marriage in our state.
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The problem is, Ames, you want to leave the religion part out of the argument and it IS the argument for most people against gay marriage. I divide people against gay marriage into two or three groups and the religious ones are the main ones. See, they are stupid because they think we are trying to steal the holy ceremony part of marriage. They are too dumb to realize we already have THAT part. All a gay person has to do is find a gay friendly church or a gay church and there it is. We get the ritual. Neener neener Asshats. They can’t take that away from us.
You knew my dad, Ames. He was about as conservative as you can get and yet he supported gay marriage. He was stunned that other conservatives don’t. He saw it as a conservative issue and a conservative right because it is about having control over one’s own body, money and property. …and what is the difference between my dad and other Southern conservatives? He was an atheist. This is the part we are fighting for. Being able to sign ONE document and having all these rights. We already have the holy moley part.
Another type of people who are against gay marriage are the Morons. The people who are dumb as a sack of crap and think the complexities of humanity can be distilled down to idiotic metaphors about jigsaw puzzles and the way they fit together. Someone just needs to point out a little biology to them. Homosexuality exists in just about every species. Our uteruses don’t fall out when we come out. …and gay men don’t stop producing fertile sperm. We can still carry on the species. The only difference is, when we have babies it is because we decide to. We think about it and what we could offer a child and what a child of ours might offer the world. We don’t just have babies because someone forgot the rubbers.
…and the last group are the squeamish ones. The ones who are classic, psychology-wise, homophobes. They get a little hard and stiff when they think about it and THAT freaks them out. So they hate those of us who are happy with it.
I don’t know what to do with any of these three groups. The last two groups are the ones easiest, in my opinion, to change but they are the ones in the minority, imo, as far as groups going around fanatically trying to squelch our rights. What to do? What to do? I just don’t know.
Jeff