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Edited on Thu Nov-06-08 03:46 PM by Plaid Adder
Yesterday I sent an email to a friend of mine out in California. A little over ten years ago, my partner and I drove a tiny rented Geo Metro through the hills of California to watch her get married to her partner. It was then and is still the best wedding memory I have. Of course, this was in 1997, and there was no legal component to it. It was just a ceremony, officiated by a woman they knew, a rite that the two of them had made up together and were celebrating in front of the community of friends and family they had invited. They had already been together for several years, of course; her family was mostly OK with it but her mother was still not prepared to take the relationship seriously. One of their friends played guitar; they exchanged vows; they asked if anyone in the audience had anything to say in support. I said something, and I can't remember all of it, but part of it was this: "It's a hard thing to keep love alive in an evil world, but no matter how hard it is it's always worth it."
After the wedding, they registered as domestic partners. Many years later, when the mayor of San Francisco decided he was just going to start marrying same-sex couples, the two of them ran down to the state house and became one of the band of renegade spouses who then had their licenses canceled out by the courts afterward. And then, when the state supreme court finally made it really legal, she and her wife went downtown and got married--for the third time.
And now Prop 8 has passed, and they don't know whether they're married or not.
In my email, I told them that they are married, that their years together and the experience of that first wedding can never be taken away from them no matter what happens. But of course that isn't going to be much comfort. I know well enough how hurtful and humiliating this is; I've been through it myself. This December my partner and I will celebrate our 20th anniversary together. There's been a lot of water under the bridge since 1988; a lot of changes in our country and certainly a lot of changes both in what it means to be gay and what it means to be married. We are going to be legally married fairly soon in Boston, where it appears that the attempt to amend the state constitution has been abandoned. But of course that won't do us much good back here, blue as our state is. People we tell about this seem surprised we're not making a bigger deal over it. The truth is that it is a big deal, but that it also isn't. Because we know well enough by now that what the state gives, the state can take away. What we have, we hold, and nobody can take it from us. We want the legal rights that other married couples have. But we also do not want to give anyone else, other than us, the power to say that we are not really married.
It is humiliating to be legally blocked from doing something every straight couple takes for granted. It hurts a lot. It hurts worse to see, every time one of these anti-same-sex marriage initiatives makes it to the ballot, all the latent homopohbia crawling out of the woodwork and dripping down the walls into the voting booth. For us, the passage of anti-marriage and anti-family initiatives against us all over the country during this historic election isn't just a fly in the ointment.
I've now seen several threads here railing about the fact that minority voters who supported Obama still voted for Prop 8 in California. I do not dispute the facts nor do I belittle the anger and hurt under the ranting. I will say only this: Yeah, it's tragic that members of one minority group wouldn't see common cause and act in solidarity with those of another. But you know what, it's been a fact of American political culture for all my life and it happens in all directions. I don't see what's to be gained by beating up on each other over it now. Why not blame fundamentalist Christianity instead? Because that's what's perpetuating homophobia, in white and minority communities alike.
Here is the basic problem: There is simply not enough popular support for same-sex marriage in most parts of the country to make it a reality *except* through the courts. Massachusetts has worked out because the vast majority of Massachusettsians either support marriage equality or don't give a shit who gets married--and because it is harder to amend Massachusetts's state constitution than it is to amend California's. Demographics aside, the truth is this: at least since I've been paying attention, whenever an anti-same-sex-marriage initiative gets on a state ballot, it passes. The only way to win against these damn things is to keep them off the ballot.
Why do they always pass? Because the Bradley Effect is not a myth; it is only misapplied. There are loads of straight people out there who are fine with gay people in most every way but still in their heart of hearts do not want them to get their mitts on marriage. Why? Who knows. Nostalgia for "tradition," maybe; some unarticulated emotional resistance to the idea that they have not tried to identify or examine; bullshit about how we don't really need marriage because civil unions are just as good; refusal to let go of heterosexual privilege; I don't know. All I know is that the number of people in this country who can be perfectly decent to gay people on a day to day basis and even believe that gay people are just A-OK is a lot larger than the number of people who understand why marriage equality matters to us and truly want us to have it. And they don't talk about that, because they know it would only lead to hurt feelings and anger; but they go into the booth and pull that lever all the same.
Until that's not true any more, we're going to keep getting pounded like this. I hope that it will someday not be true any more; but it will be a slow process. Still, if you look at what's happened even in the past 20 years, there is plenty of room for hope there. When my partner and I got together, we could never have imagined that gay people would be able to get married ANYWHERE in this country; nor could we have imagined that we would ever have a child together. Let alone that my mother would ever come around to it, which is really the biggest miracle. The change WE need is coming; it's already in progress. But the charge will not be led by our politicians, because they know that marriage equality is a loser for them. Until popular opinion shifts, they're going to be useless to us on that score. Obama, I fear, included.
But Obama's victory does make things better for us, even though my hopes to see him actually working for us are not high. Because he's president, we will not have another four years--or God forbid, eight--of right-wing Christianity screaming invective against us through every channel of communication that the U.S. government controls. Palin's national humiliation in the media and the crushing defeat of the McCain/Palin ticket have significantly diminished the power of the religious right and sent the message to the rest of the country that they no longer have to train themselves to believe that crazy view of the world. That will make a huge difference in our battle to change public opinion about our right to marry.
In the meantime, though, we can no longer get married in California and unmarried couples (of ANY description) can no longer adopt children in Arkansas. And that sucks. A lot.
The Plaid Adder
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