***
For 19 years I hid my
attraction to guys – both from myself and the rest of the world. While a
sophomore at Indiana
University in the fall of
1970, a kind, patient Navy veteran (Jerry) opened my closet door and out I
came. It was a different world in 1970. And 1970 was a different world for the
millions of gay people who came out decades before me. Never did any of us
imagine the Supreme Court of the United States ruling in favor of
equal rights for gay people. Frankly, we never imagined gay equality becoming a
national issue. Who’d’ve thunk it way back then? I think of my many friends
from college and NYC struck down by AIDS who’d be stunned to see where gay
people stand today in American society.
Why are equal rights for gay
people such a big deal? Same reason that equal rights for Black people were a
big deal. However, contrary to our Supreme Court deeming Black people to be
property not citizens (Dred Scott v. Sanford), the very concept
of gay people having nationally recognized equal rights wasn’t even
contemplated. Gay folks were (and still are) scorned, denigrated, mocked, beaten and murdered.
One wonders why gay people usually have such a tough time accepting their
sexuality. Easy answer: tough to accept being someone historically and
traditionally despised by society. Years ago, God help anyone speaking up in
favor of fags and dykes.
We are who we are as you are
who you are. In a brilliant youtube video (http://youtu.be/QJtjqLUHYoY),
straight people were asked when they decided to become straight. Most people
looked at the interviewer as if he had 3 heads. Gay people don’t choose their
sexual orientation any more than straight people do. Black people don’t choose
their skin color any more than Caucasians do. Women don’t choose their gender any
more than men do. As Lady Gaga says, we’re “Born This Way”.
On June 26, 2013 the United
States Supreme Court decided United States
v. Schlain (holding DOMA to be unconstitutional) and Hollingsworth v. Perry (effectively overturning California’s Proposition 8 banning gay
people from being married). The legal niceties, language parsing and media
dissection is all over the web, cable news and in the two articles below. I’m not
so presumptuous as to offer a new take on those. What I have to say is summed
up in three words: “It’s about time!”
Now let’s get back to opening
the hearts and minds of those still refusing to afford equal rights to all.
(Get that New Jersey Governor Chris Christie?)
HAPPY PRIDE!
^^^
Victory for Equal Rights
by THE EDITORIAL BOARD
JUNE 26, 2013
Today’s two Supreme
Court rulings
involving same-sex marriage were a huge and
gratifying victory in the long struggle to end government-sanctioned
discrimination against gay and lesbian Americans. It is sad, this deep into the
national conversation about equal rights, that five justices were not willing
to recognize a constitutional right for all couples to marry, regardless of the
state where they live or their genders. But the momentum for marriage equality
seems unstoppable, and such a breakthrough will eventually come.
The first ruling struck down
the central provisions of the Defense of Marriage Act, the odious 1996 federal
law that denied federal benefits to same-sex couples married in jurisdictions that
permit such unions. The second decision will nullify Proposition 8, California’s
voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage. Both decisions are huge victories for
the gay rights movement that propels the nation toward greater fairness and
full equality.
However, as many observers
predicted, the Roberts court failed to deliver the larger verdict that the
Constitution calls for in its equal protection clause: a broad ruling
establishing a nationwide right of same-sex couples to wed. The court missed a
historic chance to correct a longstanding injustice and left gay people in much
of the country relegated to an inferior status that a growing majority of
Americans knows is wrong.
The court may have believed
that the country is not ready for such a sweeping approach. If so, it has
overestimated the issue’s divisiveness and underestimated the human costs of
further delay.
In the first case, United States
v. Windsor, a 5-to-4 majority overturned a portion of the Defense of Marriage
Act that defined marriage as a union only between a man and a woman for the
purposes of more than 1,000 federal laws and programs. The plaintiff in the
case, a New York
octogenarian named Edith Windsor, brought her challenge after she was required to
pay some $360,000 in federal estate taxes from which opposite-sex spouses are
exempt. The Defense of Marriage Act did not allow the Internal Revenue Service
to treat Ms. Windsor as a surviving spouse following the death of Thea Clara
Spyer, the woman with whom she lived for more than 40 years and married in Canada
in 2007.
The Defense of Marriage Act
was “unconstitutional as a deprivation of the equal liberty of persons that is
protected by the Fifth Amendment,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the
majority opinion that was joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen
Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.
By seeking to injure the
class New York
had sought to protect by allowing same-sex marriages, the act “violates basic
due process and equal protection principles applicable to the federal
government.” The law’s insidious provisions were the last in federal law to
require discrimination against gay people. The majority was right not to seize
upon the odd procedural posture of the case — the Obama administration sought
Supreme Court review although it had stopped defending the Defense of Marriage
Act and won a lower federal court ruling finding it unconstitutional — in order
to avoid reaching the merits, as the court’s other four justices favored.
In the Proposition 8 case,
Hollingsworth v. Perry, a differently composed 5-to-4 majority led by Chief
Justice John Roberts Jr. avoided ruling on the merits of the constitutional
challenge to the discriminatory ballot measure by finding that its proponents
lacked standing to appeal. Nevertheless, on a hugely positive note, the court’s
feint clears the way for same-sex marriages in California.
The dismissal of the
Proposition 8 challenge leaves intact the sound 2010 ruling by a now-retired
federal trial judge in San Francisco, Vaughn Walker. Following a much-publicized
three-week trial, he found that same-sex marriage caused no harm whatsoever to
the state or society but substantial harm to same-sex couples by depriving them
of their rights to equal protection and due process. With California
joining a dozen other states and the District
of Columbia already in the marriage equality column,
roughly 30 percent of Americans live in places where same-sex marriage is
allowed.
Americans’ acceptance of
same-sex marriage, and the legal and political support for it, have come very
far, very fast in the four years since two prominent lawyers on opposite sides
of the 2000 Bush v. Gore case, Theodore Olson and David Boies, filed the
challenge to Proposition 8 that culminated on Wednesday.
But there are miles yet to
travel on this civil rights journey. The new marriage rulings leave behind an
unsupportable state-by-state patchwork that threatens valid marriages when
state lines are crossed. Cases already in the pipeline could give the Supreme
Court another chance to fully confront the harm to real people’s lives and
establish marriage equality nationwide. Soon, we hope.
^^^
The Long Road to Marriage Equality
by GEORGE CHAUNCEY
JUNE 26, 2013
NEW HAVEN — THE Supreme
Court’s soaring decision to strike
down the core of the Defense of Marriage Act as unconstitutional is a
civil rights landmark, but the history leading up to it is poorly understood.
Marriage equality was neither inevitable nor, until recently, even conceivable.
And the struggle for it was not, as is commonly believed, a natural consequence
of the gay liberation movement that gained steam in the late 1960s.
It was not until the 1980s
that securing legal recognition for same-sex relationships became an urgent
concern of lesbians and gay men. Decades earlier, such recognition was almost
unimaginable. In the 1950s, most states criminalized gay people’s sexual
intimacy. Newspaper headlines blared the State Department’s purge of homosexual
employees during the McCarthy-era “lavender scare.” Police cracked down on
lesbian and gay bars and other alleged “breeding grounds” of homosexuality.
The lesbian and gay
liberation movements of the early 1970s did not make marriage a priority —
quite the opposite. Activists fought police raids, job discrimination and
families’ rejection of their queer children. Most radical activists scorned the
very idea of marriage. But a handful walked into clerks’ offices across the
country to request marriage licenses. State officials suddenly realized that
their laws failed to limit marriage to a man and a woman; no other arrangement
had been imagined. By 1978, 15 states had written this limitation into law.
A “traditional family values”
movement arose to oppose gay rights and feminism. Anita Bryant and other
activists took aim at some of the earliest local anti-discrimination laws, and
by 1979 they had persuaded voters in several cities to repeal them.
Subsequently, in more than 100 state and local referendums, gay-rights
activists had to defend hard-won protections. This, not marriage, consumed much
of their energy.
It was the ’80s that changed
things. The AIDS epidemic and what came to be known as the “lesbian baby boom”
compelled even those couples whose friends and family fully embraced them to
deal with powerful institutions — family and probate courts, hospitals,
adoption agencies and funeral homes — that treated them as legal strangers.
Hospitals could deny the gay
partner of someone with AIDS visitation privileges, not to mention consultation
over treatment. He couldn’t use his health insurance to cover his partner. He
risked losing his home after his partner died, if his name wasn’t on the lease
or if he couldn’t pay inheritance taxes on his partner’s share (which would not
have been required of a surviving spouse).
When two women shared
parenting and the biological mother died, the courts often felt obliged to
grant custody to her legal next of kin — even if the child wished to remain
with the nonbiological mother. If the women separated, the biological mother
could unilaterally deny her ex the right to see their children.
Couples used wills, powers of
attorney and innovative new legal arrangements like domestic partnerships and
second-parent adoption to try to get around these injustices, an astounding
achievement given the reigning conservatism of the ’80s and early ’90s. But for
all their virtues, none of these arrangements could provide the Social
Security, tax, immigration and other benefits that only marriage could bestow.
The marriage movement emerged
out of this maelstrom, but it was always about more than legal benefits.
Historically, denial of marriage rights has been a powerful symbol of people’s
exclusion from full citizenship. Enslaved people in America did not have the right to
marry before the Civil War; Jews did not have the right to marry non-Jews in
Nazi Germany. In 1948, the United Nations enshrined the freedom to marry as
a fundamental human right.
That same year California’s
highest court became the first in the nation to overturn a state law banning
interracial marriage.
As attitudes toward
homosexuality changed in the 1990s, before accelerating ever more rapidly over
the last decade, antigay activists — who had already fought gay teachers in
schools, gay-student groups, gay characters on TV, domestic partnerships and
anti-discrimination laws — redoubled their fight against marriage equality. In
1996, when it appeared that Hawaii’s courts might let same-sex couples wed,
Congress passed DOMA, which declared that no state needed to give “full faith
and credit” to another state’s same-sex marriages. It also denied federal
recognition and benefits to such marriages — the provision struck down on
Wednesday. As Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority: “DOMA’s
principal effect is to identify a subset of state-sanctioned marriages and make
them unequal.”
When Massachusetts became the first state to let
gay couples marry, in 2004, it unleashed opposition as well as euphoria. That
year, 13 states amended their constitutions to ban such marriages (12 had
already done so legislatively). Ultimately, California and 40 other states acted to
limit marriage to one man and one woman by constitutional amendment,
legislation or both; in 30 states, the amendments are on the books. As a result
of another Supreme Court ruling on Wednesday, California
will soon join 12 states (and the District
of Columbia) in permitting same-sex marriage, but the
state-by-state battle will grind on elsewhere.
The intensity of the backlash
against marriage equality eventually produced its own backlash. Many
heterosexuals sought to distance themselves from the antigay animus it
expressed. Young people, who grew up in a cultural universe different from
their parents’, began to wonder why marriage was an issue at all. Political
figures as different as Barack Obama and Rob Portman described how their
children had affected their thinking.
Federal benefits will dramatically
improve the lives of countless people, from the lesbian widow who needs her
wife’s Social Security benefits to hold onto her home to the gay New Yorker
whose foreign husband will now be able to live with him in America. Couples will no longer suffer
the indignity of having the government treat their marriages as inferior.
Urgent problems still
confront lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, including the endemic
bullying of queer students, discrimination in housing and employment and the
surge in new H.I.V. infections among young gay and bisexual men. Marriage
equality has singular legal, cultural and practical significance. Nonetheless,
it was not the first issue to animate the struggle for equality and dignity —
nor will it be the last.
George Chauncey, a professor of
history and American studies at Yale, was an expert witness in both of the
same-sex marriage cases decided Wednesday.
***
