Friendly Fire

You know how the world is made up of shades of grey, and most moral issues are extremely complex, and people of good will can sincerely disagree on them?

I come across issues like that all the time, and manage to live with them. In fact, I'm usually the one in a debate on, say, how to feed a dog, who is so busy seeing all sides of the issue that I get yelled at for not taking a stand.

But when I'm talking about marriage equality for lesbians and gay men, all that collapses. I become shrill and absolutist and defensive and angry and outraged. I lose my audience all the time.  I don't know what on earth to say to reach them, to make them realize what it feels like to be relegated to second class citizenship.

In fact, that phrase, "second class citizenship," that resonates so powerfully for me on this issue,  flies right over the heads of most people I use it on. I FEEL LIKE the law has relegated me to a second class of citizenship, as indeed, it has. I cannot do what my brothers have done, marry the women they love. The law prevents me. If that isn't a second class of citizenship, what is?

But if you don't already feel that way, that argument is not likely to persuade you. I don't know why, because I'm totally blind on this issue.  And what's really ironic is that, while obviously there are many opportunities to fight this one out with right wingers and fundamentalist Christians, the people I most often have this experience with are other progressives.

It literally makes me want to scream and cry and smash things to be told that my demand for marriage equality is ill-timed, hurts the cause, has to wait, isn't important enough to spend political capital on. I find it stomach-turning to have someone who HAS a legal right debate whether or not I should have 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.

There I go again. Losing you. Maybe I'm just taking this personally.

Oh wait. It IS personal.

Comments

[Travis]

Greetings,

"I become shrill and absolutist and defensive and angry and outraged."

ME TOO!!! This is why I try not to talk about religion and politics with people who don't agree with me. LOL.

I was going to say that people who are not relegated to second class citizens are never going to fully appreciate what it is to be relegated to that particular level of purgatory. I think on some level that is true, but on another level I think it's possible for all people to empathize with feeling "second class", because probably in some area of their lives most everybody feels that way, unless you've got "Prince" before your name or "Kennedy" after it.

The statement that always sort of gets my goat is people who are married that say to me, "it's just a paper. You don't need the state to tell you you're committed to your partner. What's the big hoopla?" And then I get to list all the things that they are granted automatically with that state-sanctioned "paper" up to and including the legal "right" to make love to their spouse. In some places in this country, making love in the privacy of my bedroom with my male partner is illegal.

Of course, it's sometimes difficult to do this gently and calmly. :)

Keep up the good fight, and keep talking, my sister. People will hear you, and they'll eventually come around.

Travis

[Gina]

Don't forget: For decades African Americans who pushed for an end to Jim Crow had to deal with those in their own communities who begged them "not to cause trouble."

It's never the wrong time to do the right thing, is my opinion.