Vanasco: Kathy Griffin takes on Prop 8

[WillParkinson]

Vanasco: Kathy Griffin takes on Prop 8
By Jennifer Vanasco, editor in chief, 365gay.com 07.27.2009 2:47pm EDT
Entertainment & Sports

Kathy Griffin is on our side. She feels so strongly about gay marriage that she’s devoted a whole episode of her show - Life on the D-List - to it, which will air tonight, Monday, July 27 at 10 p.m. EST on Bravo.

Griffin visits Melissa Etheridge and is crowned “Norma Gay.” She talks to gay youth and tries to convince them to be activists. But the best part of the episode is watching her roam around a suburban neighborhood explaining to skeptics that the next time it comes up for a vote, they should be in favor of gay marriage.

(Unfortunately, she’s a bit murky with the facts - she tells one African-American woman that domestic partner rights are not equivalent to marriage in California. She says that gays and lesbians miss out on 1,000 + rights. This is not quite true. Domestic partnership is essentially equivalent to state marriage in California - there are differences, some significant, but not nearly 1,000. What Griffin probably meant was that, should the Defense of Marriage Act be repealed, then the 18,000 gay California couples who are legally married will then get all the federal benefits of marriage - which indeed number over 1,000.)

Favorite scene? Griffin convincing a 90-year-old woman that she’s not against gay marriage after all.

http://www.365gay.com/blog/vanasco-kathy-griffin-takes-on-prop-8/

[Bluenorthwest]

1. She's right. Domestic Partnership rights are not equivalent to marriage

in CA or any other place. There are huge differences, for example, the current 'health care reform' refers to 'spouses' in regard to benefits, and that excludes domestic partners automatically, just from the word being applied.
To be equivalent to marriage, there would have to be Federal rights, tax law equality, and the ability to move freely about the country retaining the same rights. Marriage does all of those things.
If you want to take issue with her numbers, I'd be glad to sit down with you, the IRS code, and count quickly to 1,000 just from their regulations alone. Then we go to immigration law. A few hundred more. So I say Kathy is correct, and any half baked arrangement that pretends to bestow rights to me that in fact does not do so is perhaps more destructive to the goal of equality than having no arrangement at all. Because people say things like 'it is the same as marriage' when it is as different as night and day.

[Toasterlad]

2. Couldn't Agree More.