Category: Marriage Equality

From a pitch for the anti-marriage constitutional amendment in Florida:

My friend John Stemberger’s efforts to save marriage is closing in on an important milestone. They are only 13,000 ballots away from the required 611,000+ needed to put a marriage ammendment [sic] on the ballot for the 2008 elections.

The amendment would change Florida’s constitution to define marriage as a union between one man and one woman, so that marriage cannot be defined in ways that the Bible forbids, and so that marriages and families can be protected by state law.

The Bible forbids. Chris Kelly observes:

Now I know what you’re thinking: Why doesn’t a nice place like Florida already have a law making sure that lesbians know they’re not as good as women who get fucked with penises, and that they never forget it? Well, it does. It’s already illegal for gay people to get married in Florida.

Sure, but who cares when the state constitution doesn’t explicitly reflect what the Bible forbids? I guess this is all news to Rich Lowry. It’s all funny, isn’t it, until someone who isn’t gay gets hurt.

The state’s Supreme Court case is delayed by a deluge of amicus briefs – more than in any case in the chief justice’s memory. With any luck, it will be worth the wait.

What is Brian Williams editorializing about?

The Republican mayor of San Diego just reversed himself on marriage equality and agreed to sign a a City Council resolution supporting a challenge to California’s gay marriage ban (also opposed by the state legislature). Moving video moment here. He’d previously vowed to veto it. He has a lesbian daughter, it turns out, and like many other parents of gay children, simply didn’t believe it was a positive step to keep her segregated from her own family and community and stigmatized as inferior. Here’s his full statement.

With me this afternoon is my wife, Rana. I am here this afternoon to announce that I will sign the resolution that the City Council passed yesterday directing the City Attorney to file a brief in support of gay marriage.

My plan, as has been reported publicly, was to veto that resolution, so I feel like I owe all San Diegans an explanation for this change of heart. During the campaign two years ago, I announced that I did not support gay marriage and instead supported civil unions and domestic partnerships. I have personally wrestled with that position ever since.  My opinion on this issue has evolved significantly — as I think have the opinions of millions of Americans from all walks of life.

In order to be consistent with the position I took during the mayoral election, I intended to veto the Council resolution. As late as yesterday afternoon, that was my position.

The arrival of the resolution — to sign or veto — in my office late last night forced me to reflect and search my soul for the right thing to do. I have decided to lead with my heart — to do what I think is right — and to take a stand on behalf of equality and social justice. The right thing for me to do is to sign this resolution.

For three decades, I have worked to bring enlightenment, justice and equality to all parts of our community.

As I reflected on the choices that I had before me last night, I just could not bring myself to tell an entire group of people in our community that they were less important, less worthy and less deserving of the rights and responsibilities of marriage — than anyone else — simply because of their sexual orientation.

A decision to veto this resolution would have been inconsistent with the values I have embraced over the past 30 years. I do believe that times have changed. And with changing time, and new life experiences, come different opinions. I think that’s natural, and certainly it is true in my case.

Two years ago, I believed that civil unions were a fair alternative. Those beliefs, in my case, have since changed. The concept of a "separate but equal" institution is not something that I can support.

I acknowledge that not all members of our community will agree or perhaps even understand my decision today. All I can offer them is that I am trying to do what I believe is right.

I have close family members and friends who are members of the gay and lesbian community. These folks include my daughter Lisa and her partner, as well as members of my personal staff.

I want for them the same thing that we all want for our loved ones — for each of them to find a mate whom they love deeply and who loves them back; someone with whom they can grow old together and share life’s wondrous adventures.

And I want their relationships to be protected equally under the law. In the end, I could not look any of them in the face and tell them that their relationships — their very lives — were any less meaningful than the marriage that I share with my wife Rana.

Watching the following clip from the Republican debate last night, you can feel the death of an argument. Conservatism has often stood for freedom; now, so often, it doesn’t. And the Granite State conservatives still in the GOP – and not chased out by the Christianists – know that freedom means freedom for everybody, as Dick Cheney once put it. Notice also Brownback’s outright lie about same-sex marriage in the north of Europe. He is clearly claiming that after equal marriage rights were introduced there, heterosexual marriage rates plummeted and illegitimacy rates soared. He knows that isn’t true. In fact, that kind of crude causal, chronological relationship has even been denied by the anti-marriage equality advocates like Stanley Kurtz. If you have to lie to maintain an argument, it’s a moribund one:

The Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart was selected as a questioner of the Democratic candidates by the Human Rights Campaign. He did a good job, I thought. He also fit the bill: a Democrat, and a pliant member of the gay establishment. But it seems to me that he represents something that plagues gay elites. To put it bluntly, they have limited conviction about their own equality, especially if it means challenging those who give them access to power. Capehart is an openly gay journalist with wide access to the media. He is of the same generation as the rest of us who have forged a revolution in public attitudes about homosexuality. He is of the AIDS generation. He is a black man wirting and working at a time when gay black men need all the support they can get. But I have never seen a piece of his, an editorial or a speech defending or advancing the case for marriage equality – for his own equality as an American and as a human being. I wanted to make sure so I emailed him to see if I’d missed something. He wrote back:

Except for two editorials for the Washington Post (one on New Hampshire’s civil unions law [Gay Gains] and the failure to derail Massachusetts gay marriage law [The Sky Didn’t Fall]), I have not written a signed piece in favor of marriage.

But he did manage to write a signed op-ed Monday defending the Democrats’ decision not to support gay equality. He wote that he didn’t "fault them" for their decision. He also played the usual card of defending Democratic cowardice and illogic because the GOP is worse. Sigh. Capehart’s one of the good guys, he’s an excellent journalist, and he played a role in getting Bloomberg to back marriage equality. But sometimes movements are too pragmatic for their own good. Sometimes, a writer is called to stand up for something, rather than defend those who cannot stand for what’s right. Too many gay activists in Washington have flunked that test. If we are not passionate about our own equality, how do we expect straight politicians to be?

A reader writes:

On February 19 this year I saw Obama speak at a fundraising event in San Francisco. There were about 80 people, at $2300 a person. He was asked about gay marriage (or "marriage equality" as I recall the questioner phrased it). In that small setting, without ever saying so outright, Obama made it very clear that his decision not to support gay marriage was political and not principled. In a perhaps anxious attempt to get us to understand his predicament, he drew an analogy. 

He mentioned that under the miscegenation laws existed in the 1960s (before Loving v. Virginia in ’67) his own mother and father could not have married in many states.  And so he understood personally the importance of "marriage equality".  But then he drew the audience’s attention to the work of Martin Luther King Jr. in the early 1960s – those same years leading up to Loving v. Virginia – on issues such as voting rights, employment discrimination and education. He told us that he had asked himself many times, if he had been in King’s position in 1963, would he have "leaned" on the issue of miscegenation — or would he have postponed it?  His answer of course was that he would have put it off — even if it meant that his own parents’ marriage would have remained illegal in many states.  This pragmatic argument – coupled with a rueful mention of the mixing of the term "marriage" with religious traditions in many people’s minds – was the best he could offer. In effect he was saying, I can’t do this now – I can’t even say anything more … We have to wait.

Strangely, his tone was so personal and thoughtful that, from what I saw, he won the crowd to his side – at least in the moment.  It helped that he finished his answer with a direct look at the questioner and then a scan of the audience as a whole, saying very clearly, "I will continue to listen to my gay and lesbian friends on this."  It almost felt as if he was winking at us in some solemn way (I can’t say it, but I am with you!).

The best response is Hannah Arendt’s, written in the heat of the African-American civil rights struggle, in 1959 in Dissent. It’s excerpted in my same-sex marriage anthology. She believed that marriage equality was the sine qua non of the civil rights movement. Money quote:

"The right to marry whoever one wishes is an elementary human right compared to which ‘the right to attend an integrated school, the right to sit where one pleases on a bus, the right to go into any hotel or recreation area or place of amusement, regardless of one’s skin or color or race’ are minor indeed. Even political rights, like the right to vote, and nearly all other rights enumerated in the Constitution, are secondary to the inalienable human rights to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence; and to this category the right to home and marriage unquestionably belongs."

Obama reflects what was then the consensus of the civil rights movement. Arendt’s insistence on marriage rights as more fundamental than employment or segregation was so controversial that Dissent originally refused to publish it. But Arendt’s position stemmed from her strict understanding of the limits of politics, and the distinction between the civil and the political spheres. She was not the kind of redistributionist, big government liberal that Obama is. She saw what was integral to civil equality in a system of limited government. She lost the argument at the time, although her view was later upheld by the Supreme Court. But by then, by 1967, so much damage had been done to the notion of limited government that the model was anachronistic on the racial question. I tried to revive it in Virtually Normal, and with more positive results. I thought the gay rights movement could avoid the leftist traps of the African-American civil rights movement. We’ve had some success reorienting the movement, but its natural state of entropy is, sadly, still leftist. I’m unsurprised Obama won’t challenge this. But I am quite sure he will be more supportive of gay equality than Clinton. She will pivot against gay people for her own political advantage at the drop of a hat. We know this already. We saw it happen once before. And yet, like Charlie Brown and the football, the gay movement looks to Lucy once again.

It still frustrates. They still won’t actually answer the simple question: Why do you oppose equal marriage rights? I’m sorry but I’m not interested in John Edwards’ "personal journey". In fact, I’m extremely uninterested. I want to know what his argument is. He disavows the religious rationale but offers no other. If it’s the "ick" factor, let us know. If you can’t justify that, then live up to your own convictions. Obama was just as evasive. Richardson came closest in talking about what’s "achievable." But what does that mean? The answer is: they’re too afraid to say what they believe. They still smell of fear. As long as candidates are too afraid to stand up for what they believe, why should anyone support them? We’re not electing a focus-group or a consultant. We’re supposed to be electing a president.

I’m still pinching myself. What happened yesterday didn’t get much press, but it’s an earthquake. It was the day that marriage equality came to America for good. A reader exults:

I fully expect that the social right will react just as you predict, claiming that only a popular vote could give gay marriage genuine legitimacy. But the fact of the matter is that there have been multiple popular referendums here in Massachusetts on the issue, in the form of elections to the Legislature. If there were really a hidden swell of opposition, presumably it would have punished the politicians who supported gay marriage, ushering in a new class of legislators dedicated to overturning it. What we’ve seen is the opposite: anti-gay marriage politicians being voted out en masse in favor of those who support it.  The people have spoken, over and over, and the result is one we can all be proud of, a wonderful example of our republic in action.

This is a historic moment and one every supporter of individual freedom should be celebrating. I hope you have a smile on your face.

Ear to ear. And it will soon be a personal epiphany as well, which is something I truly never expected.

Looking back on two decades of struggle, past the ashes of so many, to the clearing on which we now stand, it’s hard not to weep. Two decades ago, marriage for gays was a pipe-dream. Some of us were ridiculed for even thinking of the idea. And yet here we are. Past the vicious attack from the president, past the cynical manipulation by Rove, past the cowardice of so many Democrats, past the rank hypocrisy of the Clintons, past the inertia of the Human Rights Campaign, past the false dawn in San Francisco, and the countless, countless debates and speeches and books and articles and op-eds. Yes, we have much more to do. Yes, we still have to win over those who see our loves as somehow destructive of the families we seek merely to affirm. Yes, we don’t have federal recognition of our basic civic equality. Yes, in many, many states, we have been locked out of equality for a generation, because of the politics of fear and backlash. But look how far we’ve come. From a viral holocaust to full equality – somewhere in America, in the commonwealth where American freedom was born. In two decades. This is history. What a privilege to have witnessed it.

It was driven above all by ordinary gay and lesbian couples and their families – not activists, not lobbyists, not intellectuals. Couples and their families. It was driven by a brutal, sudden realization that we were far more vulnerable than we knew. In the plague years, husbands reeled as they were denied access to their own spouses in hospitals, as they were evicted from their shared homes in the immediate aftermath of terrible grief, and refused access even to funerals by estranged and often hostile in-laws. This day is for them, for all those who were abused and maligned and cast aside because they loved another human being. It’s also for all the lesbian mothers who realized in the last two decades just how much contempt and hatred existed for their care of their own children, who lived in constant insecurity, or who, at best, had to endure erasure from visibility. It’s for gay families in Virginia today, denied dignity and protection multiple times over, enduring popular votes of meretricious contempt, and carrying on regardless, living their lives, building their relationships, cherishing their homes, caring for their kids, honoring their parents. And it’s for the countless, countless gay couples throughout human history – who for so long had to live lives in which their deepest longings and loves were denied, crushed, ignored or threatened.

The media didn’t much notice yesterday. But America changed. The world changed. And an ancient and deep wound began, ever so slightly, to heal.

(Photo: Greg Kimball and Brian O’Connor kiss outside the State House June 14, 2007 in Boston, Massachusetts. A special convening of the congress voted to kill a referendum that would have placed the Gay Marriage issue on the ballot in 2008. BY Darren McCollester/Getty.)

In the two decades that same-sex marriage has been on the radar screen in the US, heterosexual divorce rates have declined. Do I think there’s a direct correlation? No I don’t. I think the factors driving 99 percent of marriages vastly outweigh the impact of an extra 1 percent. It’s worth noting, however, that the only state with equal marriage rights has the lowest divorce rate in the country. Somehow I think these facts will weigh more with most people than hysterical claims that my and others’ decision to settle down and commit to another person will destroy marriage as an institution.