I Want My Rights Decided By A Gay Activist Judge

So I made the mistake of reading the New York Post the other day.  I was on the Long Island Rail Road, no reading material in hand, and someone had left the paper on one of the seats.

I’ll admit I’m always a little curious about the Page Six gossip, but the NYP has always confused and frightened me at the same time.   There are guilty pleasures—Star Magazine for instance—but I get really worried about the thousands of people whose only access to news is sensationalized, hyper-cynical, slanted bilge like NYP.

I’m flipping through the stories, which are short, easy-to-read and tend to feature prostitute scandals and sex offenders, and I come to Rich Lowry’s editorial about the recent federal court decision on California’s Prop 8.  There’s the usual rhetoric:  an “activist” judge “defying the will of the people,” and calling gays degenerates who are destroying the “American family.”  But what really bugs me is Lowry’s contention that Judge Walker was unfit to decide the issue because he’s gay.

To be clear, Vaughn Walker is rumored to be gay but has never said anything about being gay or non-gay to the press.  But what if Walker is gay?  Isn’t that exactly the kind of person you want to weigh in on minority rights?  The whole Prop 8 issue is scary to me anyway as I get pretty uncomfortable with the idea of minorities being put up for approval by popular ballot.   That means we gay people—some two to ten percent of the population—have to get the votes of over half of our non-gay counterparts in order to earn legal protections that everyone else enjoys.

So the real question should be:  is it fair for a non-gay judge to decide the fate of gay Americans?

I’m personally a whole lot more comfortable with someone gay evaluating  whether or not my life, my partner is entitled to legal protection.  Historically, left up to non-gays, we’ve been imprisoned, institutionalized and victimized and discriminated against over and over again.  I’m not a separatist.  Some of my best friends aren’t gay.  But this crap about gay people needing to recuse themselves from legal decisions involving our own rights is outrageously absurd.

Not that the same tactics haven’t been used against other minority groups.  Remember the BS about Sonia Sotomayor being “too proud” of being a Latina woman?  She had the gall to say that her cultural background could actually be an asset as a supreme court judge.

Some people say we should live in a color-blind, sexual-orientation-blind society.   I think they miss a crucial point.  Our differences are our strengths.  Most definitely when deciding culturally-sensitive issues, including same-sex marriage.

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