I was very sad but not all that surprised when the New York State Senate voted down a marriage equality bill on December 2nd. As I have written here before, I am not a romantic about marriage and view this issue as a straightforward equal protection question. Take a look at this clip of New York State Senator Diane Savino arguing in favor of the failed bill by speaking truthfully about what marriage really means today. I applaud it and her.
If you have never been to New York, belt yourself in before watching this video – you are about to see the mannerisms and hear the accent and passion I grew up with. It makes me wistful but also deeply ashamed that the core value I was taught – that everyone is entitled to equal treatment under the law – was betrayed in that senate vote. How can gay marriage still have no protection in the land of Stonewall?
ADDENDUM: I did a bit of research on Savino, never having heard of her before this debate. Finding she represents Staten Island, I shook my head. I have always considered Staten Island a mystery borough never having known anyone who actually lived there. It has a zoo. The ferry goes there and then comes back. With some further research I found what I suspected: Savino is, like me, from Queens. As my mate tells anyone who will listen, be very afraid of women from Queens.
With thanks to @thecurvature, I bring you an extraordinary video by an organization called Marriage Equality, an Irish organization working to support civil marriage for gay and lesbian people.
Today is the 2009 National Day of Silence, a day to protest bullying and harassment of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people in schools. Begun in 1996 as a student protest at the University of Virginia, it has grown to participation by over 8,000 middle and high school, colleges and universities, throughout the U.S. While the central act is a period of silence, today's activities draw attention both to the prevalence of anti-LGBT attacks in schools but also to entrenched homophobia among students and the silence on the part of society concerning it.
At 3:30 p.m. Eastern Time this afternoon I logged on to a Tweetchat of Day of Silence supporters. The feed was flooded with young people talking about how events had gone in their schools, how their teachers responded to their refusal to speak, whether they had been harassed for being LGBT or just being perceived as being LGBT. They talked about coming out to their parents and they talked about being afraid to. And this was on Twitter so this pain and anger and support and kinship all came in bursts of 140 characters. There were also allies like me in the chat – people who support the students and many who shared their own memories of being too afraid in school to be who they are.
Carl Walker-Hoover would have turned twelve years old today. However, after a school year of being bullied for "acting gay," Carl committed suicide last week. Reading about Carl's final note, leaving his Pokemon cards to his little brother, I could not help but think of my own boys his age. One of my sons loves the color pink and has taken a good bit of teasing for wearing the color whenever he can. My boys have also told me about how the word "gay" has, in the years between my childhood and theirs, become synonymous with "bad," "ugly," and "uncool."
My kids know lots of adults who are gay and we have had the discussion many times about how wrong it is use "gay" as an insult. But it is hard for them to share their feelings about this with their friends. Today I found a few videos at ThinkB4YouSpeak which provide some clear tips called "Don't Be Afraid to Tell Someone it's Not OK to Say That's So Gay." I highly recommend them.
So with my kids we talk and, while I don't think they are old enough to hear about Carl Walker-Hoover's suicide, we have watched the ThinkB4YouSpeak videos. We role play dealing with things friends say and do that is not okay.
What do you do at your house? How do you discuss homophobia and bullying at your house? Let's share our thoughts and ideas in the hope we will raise a generation of people who can proudly be whoever they are. Let's make sure there are no more children who feel the pain Carl Walker-Hoover did.
While I am finishing up a blog post on the recent run on rants by middle class white women from New York about why breastfeeding is an anti-feminist plot to keep women down, I am taking a break for some more humor about the fear of gay marriage. An organization called the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) is running television advertisements full of actors playing plain old folks who list the dire risks to their normal lives if gay people are allowed to marry. I saw a bit about it on The Rachel Maddow Show and then, in a very poor choice of ad buy, the NOM ad ran in a paid spot.
For some giggles, here is a satire of the NOM ads. Yes, it contains obscenity. And, yes, it is going to offend some people.
If you want to see the National Organization for Marriage ad I saw, it is here. I enjoyed the LEGO version much more.
I am not a huge fan of marriage. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I am not romantic about it. It could be my family history – a long line of divorces stretching back to my great-grandparents. It could be my understanding as a lawyer and an educated feminist that the legal history of marriage has been fraught with sexism – marriage has been a legal mechanism to deny women rights to property, to their children, and even to their bodies. I was already a lawyer when state criminal laws were changed to allow rape charges to be brought against husbands – it is that recently that a woman was deemed to have consented to sexual intercourse simply by virtue of being married to the man who forced her to have sex.
But then in the late '80's I began working with The AIDS Law Project of Pennsylvania. The sudden death of so many gay men left many long time mates with no rights to the homes they lived in, to the bank accounts they had helped fill, to make critical medical decisions for the people they loved and with whom they had lived their lives. I saw families that had long disowned their gay children step in and strip grieving survivors of property. People were barred from the funerals of men who were their husbands in every way but under the law.
Marriage means different things to different people. It has religious significance to many. It is a public statement of love, commitment, and an intention to be together forever. Legally, it creates entitlement to property and the right to be "next of kin" with all the power that brings. Why any two people get married is none of my business. I get to decide whether I will marry and consider the implication of that decision on me, my property, and my children. I can't fathom why anyone would think he or she has the right to make that decision for anyone else.
But, on March 5, 2009, the California Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on who gets to make this decision in California. In case you've been napping, at issue is the legality of same-sex marriage in that state and of Proposition 8, an attempt to amend the state constitution to define marriage as only possible between a man and a woman. More precisely the legal questions are:
(1) Is Proposition 8 invalid because it constitutes a revision of, rather than an amendment to, the California Constitution?
(2) Does Proposition 8 violate the separation-of-powers doctrine under the California Constitution?
(3) If Proposition 8 is not unconstitutional, what is its effect, if any, on the marriages of same-sex couples performed before the adoption of Proposition 8?
In the worst case outcome, the effect of the California Supreme Court's decision could be to "divorce" the 18,000 same-sex couples who married prior to the passage of Proposition 8 and prevent other same-sex couples from marrying. The legal briefs and some official summaries of the cases can be found here.
Keeping in mind that I am not romantic about marriage, that I think who people love and have kids with and how people dispose of their property is just plain none of my business, take a look at this video made by the Courage Campaign. It moved me to want to fight even harder to ensure that everyone has the right to marry, and stay married, to the people they love.
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