Why Can't You Just Call it Something Else?

The recent bitter loss of the presidential election has set off an orgy of doubt among Democrats and progressives. One sizeable contigent has been spouting off about gay marriage, and how the issue was responsible, at least in part, for this loss. And it's possible that it's true.

Bill Clinton and other less-luminous Dems have been quoted as suggesting that the left needs to stop advocating for the civil rights and legal equality of lesbian and gay Americans, in order to avoid offending some of the people who voted for Bush this year. One particularly bilious example of this was posted today on the Kerry-Edwards_04 yahoogroup, and it just pushed me right over the edge.

It contained my all time least-favorite argument, which is: "Why can't you just call it something else?" Among other repugnant admonitions to lesbians and gay men (including saying he couldn't support something that "only affected" 2 percent of the population), the author stated, "(I) think this gay marriage thing is wrong by name.... Yes same rights and call it by another name .... Wear white, have a ceremony, adopt, have inheritance but if you have the confidence that what you are doing can stand on it's own ... great (but) name it something you choose so it can be recognized.... Why can't the gay community have enough confidence in it's proposed lifestyle agreements that they name them something that can stand on and be judged on their own? Create a word, any word, just not marriage which has meant something  different for centuries. "

I really find it stomach-turning to have someone who HAS a legal right debate whether or not I should have it. I'm not interested in second class citizenship. I want just what everyone else has, and I don't want to "call it something else" just because someone thinks it's "icky" or politically inconvenient. They may feel that way, or like Bill Clinton find it politically expedient, but that's hardly a legitimate basis to create a second class of citizenship and force me into it.

It infuriates me to listen to all these so-called "progressives" on email lists and TV debating whether or not I should have the right to do what a drunk pimp and a hooker can run off to do on ten minutes' aquaintance after meeting in a crackhouse. It's nothing but heterosexual Jim Crow. I can marry anyone except anyone I'd ever want to marry. We both can get a drink of water from a fountain, just not the same fountain.

A woman and a man have the right to marry legally. That right brings with its exercise the protection of over 1000 federal laws and hundreds of state laws. It brings with it the right to visit your spouse in the hospital or prison, to make medical decisions for your spouse, to file joint tax returns and claim money-saving exemptions, to inherit from intestate spouses. If a US citizen marries a person from another country, the foreign spouse gains the right to reside in this country. Pensions, social security, health insurance, and death benefits all automatically kick in when legal marriage takes place. Married couples enjoy the benefits of marital life estate trusts, estate tax marital deductions, family partnership tax income, damages from injuries to a spouse, bereavement leave and benefits, unemployment benefits for quitting a job to move with a spouse to a new job, burial determination, property rights, child custody, crime victim recovery benefits, domestic violence intervention, divorce protection, exemption from property tax when a spouse dies, protection from being forced to testify against your spouse in court. This list goes on and on, but it adds up to just one thing: Second class citizenship for lesbians and gay men.

In promoting the "civil union" alternative, some people suggest, "Can't you just call it something else?" They don't really want to deny the equal protection of the law to anyone, but feel personally uncomfortable with using the term "marriage" to define same-sex unions. Is it compatible with the ideals on which this country was built to have one group of citizens live under a form of marriage apartheid, a sexual-orientation Jim Crow system? As long as there are two water fountains, does it matter if one is marked "gay" and one is marked "straight"?

Same-sex marriage is fundamentally about civil rights, and the law doesn't have to ask if those rights make one group uncomfortable. It doesn't matter that large groups of people, even a majority, might oppose those rights; civil rights don't vest by "majority rule" or popular opinion.

Is personal repugnance, the "ick" factor, sufficient to allow a powerful majority to oppose the rights of a despised minority, while holding onto those rights for itself?

And can the progressive movement ever hold its head up again, if it becomes complicit in that opposition?

Comments

[Travis]

Amen, Christie,

I was talking to a conservative cast mate the other day who has been wearing "Vote Bush" t-shirts for months, and I've bitten my tongue. Turns out he's quite a nice guy. He said that "gay marriage doesn't really affect me." I love how other people who can get married as a matter of course are intellectualizing this issue and feeling so high and mighty about their opinions one way or the other. The fact of the matter is that the legal protections afforded married partners in this country should be a right that I can access, simply because I am a member of the human race. It might be an intellectual exercise to all those heterosexuals out there, but to me, it's a personal issue of the heart, and it's my life.

Travis

[Gina]

I have to admit: The day after the election, after four days volunteering for Kerry in Colorado and seeing the fundamentalists starting to gloat over their perceived new power, I was angry at Gavin Newsome for handing Karl Rove the weapon he needed.

My friend said to me: "When is it ever the wrong time to do the right thing?" And he reminded me that in the South people were told for decades not to make trouble, and to wait for tomorrow.

It was wrong to put off civil rights then, and it's wrong to do so now. We should accept nothing less than equal rights for all Americans.

My favorite "new" quote: "The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice." -- The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Amen.