Tag Archives: Gay Marriage

Some thoughts on marriage

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Reflecting on Washington State’s recent marriage law, Eric Andrews-Katz writes about the absurd position of longtime gay committed couples (“Marriage: 4th Time The Charm, Bold Strokes Books Authors’ Blog).

His story really resonated with me. Like Andrews-Katz, me and my partner got “married” in a commitment ceremony, many years before any state recognized the legal status of gay couples (2001). Our union was solemnized by the atheist leader of our local Ethical Humanist society.

Though the ceremony conferred no rights, that first marriage held much more meaning for us than our subsequent legal wedding at a New York City clerk’s office. When friends and colleagues ask me, doe-eyed and with enormous grins, “What was it like to finally get married?” I tell them: “It was kind of like applying for food stamps.”

That’s not to say that getting a marriage certificate hasn’t changed our relationship in positive ways. It was a re-commitment to our relationship. It allowed us–with greater certainty and pride–to check off that married box on government and work-related forms. We got a frame for our marriage certificate and hung it up in our bedroom.

But our 2001 commitment ceremony will always be the day we remember. It was the day of jitters: “Are we really doing this?” The day of tears. The day of dancing with friends and drinking champagne in a limo. The best day of our lives.

I guess it’s a generational thing, and I think it’s great that younger gay couples can now go through all of that in one, fully legalized fanfare.

It’s about frickin’ time. And Andrews-Katz tells a wonderful, personal story on the subject.

I Want My Rights Decided By A Gay Activist Judge

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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.

What Dr. Seuss Taught Me About Homophobes

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I don’t often blog about current events, but there have been so many things happening in the arena of gay rights, I felt like chiming in this week.  This post also gives me a chance to explain my long-held, personal conviction that Dr. Seuss taught us everything we need to know about the politics of exclusion.  More on that later.

It’s nearing prom season, and each year for the past 15 years or so, there have been news stories big and small on the fracas over lesbian and gay couples attending.  It’s a positive sign that more teenagers are feeling comfortable coming out as gay.  Unfortunately, for many of them, participating openly and normatively in high school traditions requires lawsuits, grassroots activism and a big whooping of community outrage.

The gay/prom debate has been the source of literary and cinematic inspiration, vis-a-vis Aaron Fricke’s personal memoir “Reflections of a Rock Lobster” and the Canadian flick “Prom Queen” with Kids in the Hall’s Scott Thompson.

This year, a prom story made national headlines, morning news shows and even Ellen.  Constance McMillen, an 18-year-old senior at a public, rural Mississippi school, challenged a prom policy of heterosexual-only dates, and the school district responded by cancelling the prom for all students.   The logic was thus:  if no students get a prom, no one’s civil rights are violated.  Seems more like an elementary school teacher’s policy to me, e.g.  “You can’t chew gum in class unless you have enough for everyone.”   The problem is, by high school, kids understand the concept of individuality.  Not everyone wants a stick of your banana-mango gum, and that’s just fine.  Constance knew the score, and she got help from the ACLU.  The case went to a federal judge who ruled that Constance’s constitutional rights were violated but a trial will be underway later in the year.  As a sidebar, cancelling everything for everybody has been a gay exclusion strategy on numerous occasions when students have tried to start Gay/Straight Alliance clubs; the school district bans all student clubs.

We also have in the news a Pentagon committee reviewing the Bill Clinton era military policy “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”  So far, they’ve determined that the policy has, at times, been unfairly implemented.  This, after 17 years of enforcing a system of privilege for heterosexual military men and women and discharging over 13,000 gay troops.   But it takes time, they say, to evaluate how gays can be better integrated while ensuring the rights of all (read:  heterosexual) servicemen and women.  Meanwhile, gays serve openly in the armed forces of just about every other industrialized country:  the United Kingdom, France, Russia, Israel, to name a few.

This brings me to “The Sneeches” by Dr. Seuss.

“Now, the Star-Bellied Sneetches had bellies with stars.

The Plain-Belly Sneetches had none upon thars.

Those stars weren’t so big.  They were really so small.

You might think such a thing wouldn’t matter at all.”

But the stars mattered quite a bit to the Sneetches, and when a fast-talking salesman with a star-making machine shows up, chaos ensues.  Stars on bellies become déclassé with the help of the salesman’s star-removal machine; then, as the nouveau starred Sneetches go through the removal machine, stars become chic again, and over and over, the symbol of privilege changes, culminating in a frantic assembly line of Sneetches running from one machine to the other.  They end up losing track completely of who had stars on their bellies in the first place.  The lesson:

” The Sneetches got really quite smart on that day.

The day they decided that Sneetches are Sneetches.

And no kind of Sneetch is the best on the beaches.

That day, all the Sneetches forgot about stars and whether

They had one, or not, upon thars.”

I don’t know if Dr. Seuss had gay rights in mind when he wrote the story, but for me, it’s always captured the essence of the debate.  Whether it’s homophobes talking about how opening marriage to same-sex couples will tarnish their sacred institution.  Or “moderates” saying they would never deny gay people their rights, but Marriage is for heterosexuals and gay couples can be recognized just fine through “domestic partnerships” or “civil unions.”  Or a school board that would rather forgo a high school prom than condone the participation of gay couples.  Or military generals claiming it’s just not so simple as to allow gay people to serve openly in the armed forces—it’s an organization steeped in centuries of heterosexual tradition, after all.

Yes, the answers are often simple.  Many of us learned them in a children’s picture book.