Recently a dear southern friend instructed me passionately in the theory of "equal but separate."   "It just happens," he said, "that in my town there are three new Negro schools not equal, but superior to the white schools.  Now wouldn’t you think they would be satisfied with that?  And in the bus station, the washrooms are exactly the same.  What’s your answer to that?"

I said, "Maybe it’s a matter of ignorance.  You could solve it and really put them in their places if you switched schools and toilets.  The moment they realized your schools weren’t as good as theirs, they would realize their error."

And do you know what he said?  He said, "You trouble-making son of a bitch."  But he said it smiling.
        -John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley (1962)

Shallow understanding from people of good will, is  more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.
        -Martin Luther King Jr.

I have a proposition along the lines of Steinbeck’s.  If heterosexuals think civil unions really are equal to marriage, let them convert their marriages to civil unions.  Once we gay folk see how well civil unions work for heterosexual couples after all, it’ll really put us in our place won’t it?

I jest of course.  But I want you think about this.  If separate but equal really is equal, then why does it have to be separate?  The answer is, typically, that same-sex marriage is too controversial to be a realistic goal now.  I can appreciate a tactical decision to pursue equality in stages, but only so long as we’re all clear what the ultimate goal is, and why we have to do it that way.  But that’s not what I’m hearing in the wake of the California Supreme Court decision on marriage equality.  What I’m hearing from various quarters, not all of them heterosexual, is that we blew it in California by going for marriage, when we already had a perfectly acceptable compromise in separate but equal civil unions. 

It’s very frustrating to listen to the debate surrounding the California Supreme Court’s marriage decision to devolve into babbling talk radio crap about how foolish it is for gay people to fight this as though it’s all or nothing, and particularly in California where we already had perfectly good separate but equal civil unions.  If I hear one more time about how we’re only fighting over a word I am going to fucking explode.  Can anybody who says that just stop and think about what they’re saying for a moment? 

A word.  A word.  A motherfucking word.  Why does a motherfucking word matter?   Say, I have an idea, why not ask the heterosexuals who are fighting bitterly to keep a mere word all to themselves if that’s what they’re fighting for.   A word.  A word.  Ask them if it’s only a word.  Go ahead.  And when you ask them you need to listen to what they tell you.  You need to pay attention.  Especially when they explain to you why letting us have That Word devalues it for them. 

This is not over a word.  It’s not even over marriage as an institution.  It’s not about what marriage is to heterosexuals, but about what we are to heterosexuals.  When you understand why heterosexuals want to reserve the word ‘marriage’ for themselves, you understand why civil unions will never be equal to marriage.

After the California decision, USA Today posted an editorial that is eminently typical of the response from what King might have called the People Of Good Will.  As USA Today likes to posture as a civilized foe of bigotry, you would think they’d have warmly congratulated Californian gays on this milestone, and on their courage and fortitude the for the sake of their love.  You would think this…if you weren’t paying attention….

Last week, when California became the second state after Massachusetts to allow gay marriage, same-sex couples celebrated and began planning June weddings. Good for them. But the unfortunate and unnecessary impact of the California Supreme Court ruling might well have been to set back the cause of gay rights more broadly.

The judges ruled 4-3 that gays’ inability to get married amounts to discrimination under California’s constitution, even though the state’s domestic partnership laws give them the benefits and responsibilities of marriage.

In other words, pragmatic political compromise on the intensely controversial issue is not allowed in California. It’s all or nothing, and recent political history leaves little doubt about what will follow.

Never mind for a moment that it’s always easy to be pragmatic about someone else’s lives.  Pay attention to this.  The instinct in the "mainstream" "moderate" pews the moment, the instant, same-sex couples get a chance to marry isn’t to be happy for them, it isn’t even to raise a red flag of warning, though if you skim that editorial you might think that’s what they’re doing.  They’re not.  The point of the editorial isn’t to warn of a backlash, it assumes one.  The point is to blame the gay community for causing it.  We are always to blame for the hate leveled at us.  It is always our fault.  The distance between bigots who say the "gay lifestyle" is self destructive, and the People Of Good Will who say that we are needlessly provoking our enemies and whatever comes of that is Our Fault, is thinner then the paint on one of Fred Phelp’s God Hates Fags posters.  As far as they’re both concerned, we bring it on ourselves.

How?  The bigots say we bring it upon ourselves just by being homosexuals.  The People Of Good Will say we do it by provoking our enemies.  In other words, by defending ourselves from the bigots.  The bigots say we are unclean.  The People Of Good Will say that we should at least act like we are unclean for the sake of keeping the peace.  Besides they say, we already have all the legal protections we need.  To ask for more is just selfishly causing trouble.   We are always the trouble makers in this story.  And this story goes back a long, long way.

Once upon a time, before there was civil unions, let alone same sex marriage anywhere in the United States, the argument was that same-sex couples already had all the legal rights they need, because we could always avail ourselves of things like medical directives and powers of attorney.   The case of William Robert Flanigan Jr. and Robert Lee Daniel back in March of 2002 is instructive here.  For four hours, officials at the Maryland Shock Trauma Center barred Flanigan from his dying partner’s bedside, saying he was not "family", and that ‘partners’ did not qualify. Though Flanigan had legal power of attorney for his partner, Robert Lee Daniel, officials at the Shock Trauma Center kept him away from his partner’s bedside. Only when Daniel’s mother arrived from New Mexico, was Flanigan allowed into Daniel’s room. By that time, Daniel had lost consciousness. He would die two days later.

Because Flanigan was not present during Daniel’s final four hours of consciousness, Flanigan was unable to tell Shock Trauma that Daniel did not want breathing tubes or a respirator. When Daniel tried to rip the tubes out of his throat, staff members put his arms in restraints.

At first glance all this seems irrelevant to a discussion of civil unions.  Because Maryland at that time did not have a medical directives registry, and did not then and does not now recognize civil unions, they didn’t enter at all into the legal considerations of this case.  But look at it.  In the context of making health care decisions for his beloved,  Flanigan’s durable power of attorney gave him, in theory, for all practical purposes exactly the same rights as a spouse.  But in practice, in the moment of crisis, that durable power of attorney couldn’t have been more worthless.  United in a mere legal arrangement, as opposed to being Married, Daniel and Flanigan simply weren’t regarded as a family.  That was the immediate reflex of the hospital staff.  Their relationship wasn’t a marriage.  It was something else.  Something other then marriage.  And so Daniel died apart from his lover, with the tubes he was terrified of shoved down his throat, and his arms strapped to the bed.  There was no family there to say otherwise, as far as the hospital was concerned.  Something other then marriage, is inevitably something less then marriage. 

Flanigan later sued the hospital.  After trying different excuses, first saying they never got the paperwork on Flanigan;’s power of attorney, Maryland Shock Trauma decided to tell the jury that their emergency room was simply too busy to let him into where Daniel was being treated.  That he was allowed in when Daniel’s mother, the legitimate family, arrived, had to have been just sheer coincidence.  Ask yourself what jury would buy that if it were a heterosexual couple.  Yes…the jury bought it.  Maryland Shock Trauma was let off the hook.  Flanigan was left only with his memories of not being able to keep his beloved from the thing he feared most in his last hours on earth, and to be there with him.  The usual words of condolences, worth their weight in gold, were spoken all around.

Make no mistake, had Flanigan and Daniel been anything other then a gay couple that power of attorney would have allowed the one to make medical decisions for the other.  But what the hospital staff saw in that document wasn’t a power of attorney, but two homosexuals asking to be treated as if they were married, and that was an attack on their own marriages.  That is where the reflex came from.  When the staff told Flanigan he could not be with Daniel or have any say in how he was treated, because he was Not Family, they were not simply enforcing hospital rules, they were defending the sanctity of their own marriages.

Sanctity.  You hear the word a lot in this struggle.  Of all the careless brain dead claims being made here by People Of Good Will, the claim that gay activists have turned the fight over same-sex marriage into an all or nothing battle is the most nefarious.  In state after state, and even in California, the enemies of gay equality have either tried to, or enacted amendments that sweep away both same-sex marriage And civil unions, And anything and everything else that gives same sex couples even the passing rights that married couples enjoy, in the name of preserving the sanctity of marriage.   In the vast majority of states, this was long before same-sex marriage could even have been a possibility.  How close to same sex marriage was Virginia, when it passed its constitutional amendment barring it, as well as anything even remotely like it?  In fact, he entire history of the fight against gay equality has been waged as an all or nothing struggle by our enemies, and was long before the gay community began seeking marriage in earnest. 

Our enemies understand the logic of this fight a lot better then some of us seem to.  What’s confusing, or more likely what a lot of us are in denial about, is that the fight over same-sex marriage isn’t a fight over same-sex marriage specifically.  It’s a furious, bitter, scorched earth battle over the status of gay people.  That is the root of it, that is the thing we are all fighting over.  Are we your neighbors, or are we an abomination in the eyes of god?  Are we as human as anyone else, or are we the victims of a kind of sexual sickness?  Is the fact that we mate to our own sex just a simple and unremarkable variation like being left-handed or green-eyed, or is it a damaging distortion of natural sexuality?  If it’s the latter, it should be suppressed like any other illness afflicting humankind.  The kinder, gentler view is that we are merely some sort of unfortunate sexual cripples.  But in the eyes of the homophobes, we are a curse on humanity and you don’t grant rights to a curse on humanity. 

They have been waging this war against granting us human status for decades now.  It is not about marriage specifically, but marriage is both their trump card and the end of pretense.  Like raising the fear of homosexual child molesters, waving same-sex marriage in people’s faces frightens people into thinking gay rights is an attack on their families, on their most intimate sense of self, on that which is sacred to them.  If people who engage in unnatural, distorted sexual behavior can have their brokenness treated the same as the wholesome love of two normal heterosexuals, then that reduces the love and devotion of heterosexual couples to the level of pornography.  But the other edge to that sword is that letting same sex couples marry acknowledges their shared humanity with the heterosexual majority.  Same sex marriage is both the homophobe’s weapon, and their greatest fear, because then the battle is simply over.

I have watched this fight for decades.  Not the marriage fight.  The gay civil rights fight.  And I tell you, Every Step Of The Way, whether it was over the right to hold down a job, to the right to simply have sex with the one you love without being thrown in jail for sodomy, our enemies have turned every single solitary step we have taken, every meager right we have ever fought for, into a fight over same-sex marriage.  Oh, we can’t give them hospital visitation rights, it would lead to homosexual marriage!!!  Oh we can’t give them protection from discrimination in the workplace, that will lead to homosexual marriage!!!  What was the first thing they started screaming about after the U.S. Supreme Court voided the sodomy laws?  It wasn’t that the queers would start having sex now.  They know we’re having sex.  They immediately started babbling about same-sex marriage.  They don’t give a rat’s ass about our having sex.  Animals have sex too.  But only human beings marry.

So much, so obvious.  What should have been more illuminating then it seems to have been, was how after Lawrence v. Texas the mainstream news media and all the so-called liberal and moderate middle of the spectrum pundits started worrying about the possibility of same-sex marriage too.  Mostly to re-assure each other that Justice Kennedy had said their decision shouldn’t wouldn’t lead to that.  This was the reaction on the part of the self described sensible middle of the roaders, the People Of Good Will, to the fact that we were no longer presumptive criminals simply by virtue of being homosexual: Gosh…I hope this doesn’t lead to them getting married or anything.  But why shouldn’t it?  Why shouldn’t people who say they’re against ignorant bigotry towards their gay neighbors, want us to have the same status they do?

Because, they don’t really mean it.  For the People Of Good Will, we may not be a curse on all mankind, but we are still sexual cripples at best, if not disgusting perverts at worst.  They might agree that civil society should tolerate our existence the sake of the freedoms of all.  They may not go on crusades against homosexuality.  But you need to not mistake that for enlightenment or even tolerance.  It is disgust.  They just don’t want to deal with it.  They aren’t going on crusades because they find the entire subject distasteful.  And that distaste has consequences. 

When they say civil unions is a rational compromise between two extremes, look at that, really look at it.  It is the middle ground between your being wholly and completely human, and being cursed by God that they are saying is a rational compromise we should gratefully accept if we weren’t so stubborn.  In exchange for just shutting up so they don’t have to deal with our existence, we are being offered the compromise status of damaged goods.  But you don’t treat damaged goods as though they are anything but damaged. 

Here is how USA Today viewed the decision of the California Supreme Court:

…the domestic partnership laws in California are hardly equivalent to the egregious racial discrimination of the Jim Crow era. Far from denying rights, they guarantee gays equal treatment in such important areas as raising children, assigning responsibility for medical choices and settling financial matters.

By pushing the envelope, the California ruling will help those who want to deny gays such rights — blatant discrimination that reaches far beyond understandable differences rooted in the religious meaning of marriage. Even in California, an initiative is already underway to put a same-sex marriage ban into the state constitution. Similar bans are likely to be considered in Arizona and Florida. Failed attempts to amend the U.S. Constitution will revive.

The special status and sanctity of marriage is the ultimate blessing for couples who want to spend their lives together. Eventually, the nation might be ready to extend the institution to same-sex couples. But, as  New Jersey’s top judges wrote in a 2006 gay marriage decision, courts "cannot guarantee social acceptance, which must come through the evolving ethos of a maturing society."

It will be regrettable if the impact of the California decision is to slow or reverse that evolution.

Look at that first paragraph I quoted, where they offer the separate but (at least somewhat) equal defense of civil unions.  But just how egregeous could Jim Crow have been, if black people merely had to drink out of separate fountains.  After all…it was the same water…right…?

There is separate but equal.  But if all you see in that photograph is the black guy has equal access to water you are missing the egregious nature of Jim Crow, just as the editors of USA Today are missing the egregious nature of civil unions.  In point of fact, all it takes to see nothing wrong with what is happening in that photo, is to not see the humanity of the black man.  He has water…what’s the problem?

The special status and sanctity of marriage is the ultimate blessing for couples who want to spend their lives together. Eventually, the nation might be ready to extend the institution to same-sex couples.  Here the editors of USA Today admit out of the other side of their mouths, that this special status, that sanctity, that Ultimate Blessing, is precisely what civil unions are meant to exclude us from.  It does not, and you have to understand this, signify a legal status, so much as a social understanding.  And that social understanding is that our unions, that our love, does not rise to the sacred level of heterosexual love, and does not merit the same special status, the same blessing, that heterosexual love does.  This is the premise, spoken and unspoken, behind every appeal to the "special status of marriage".  It is not that marriage is so special after all, but that we are not worthy.

This is why giving same-sex couples access to marriage desecrates it.  That is why they use the language of desecration when we agitate for the right to marry.  By enacting the rites of marriage, we don’t celebrate it, we can only desecrate it.  That can only make sense if you regard gay people as incapable of experiencing love and intimacy as profoundly, as urgently, as heterosexuals do.  And that only make sense if you see gay people as irredeemably damaged goods.  And that is the thinking.  Same-sex marriage desecrates the Institution of marriage because homosexual love is only one step removed from pornography, if that.  That is why, exactly why, you hear them saying that same-sex marriage means "anything goes."  That simply does not follow absent the view that homosexuals don’t really love, they just have sterile, barren, pitiable sexual assignations, and pretend that it’s love. 

The People Of Good Will may be disgusted at the thought of gay sex, or they may feel pity for us and think themselves progressive because they would have us be treated with compassion and concern, just as you would treat anyone with a profound handicap.  But you don’t hang forgeries in an art museum, you don’t sell water as whiskey, you don’t treat someone who bought a degree over the Internet as though they’d actually been to college, and you don’t treat a same-sex couple as though they are married.  To do otherwise is to cheapen marriage into meaninglessness.   Same sex couples do not experience intimate romantic love as profoundly as heterosexuals do.  That Is the thinking. 

And that is why civil unions will never be equal to marriage.  The statutes defining them could read absolutely identically, word for word, comma for comma, period for period, and they will not be treated equally to marriages, because the basic premise defining them, the bedrock they rest upon, is that homosexual love is not the real thing, but a cheap, if not ugly mockery of the real thing.  No injury, no foul.  Civil unions, as a substitute for marriage, are not even a consolation prize.  They are a facade of respect, erected upon what heterosexuals consider to be a facade of love.

And that understanding of our love lives, of our humanity, has consequences.  Does anyone actually believe that most people voting against both same sex marriage and civil unions really don’t understand they are voting away both?  Do you really think that people who believe we desecrate the institution of marriage will respect our unions if they merely go by another name?  Wake up please.  Ask William Robert Flanigan Jr. how well a substitute for marriage works.  Ask the civil union’ed couples in New Jersey and Vermont who found out the difference between a marriage and a civil union that had all the same rights on paper, but not the same regard in the eyes of people who know that a civil union is a civil union precisely because it does not represent a sacred human bond like marriage does, but at best a pale imitation of one.  In the courts, in the public square, in the neighborhoods and villages, in the emergency rooms and in the funeral homes, absent the kind of recognition of our humanity that would make civil unions superfluous anyway, every civil union they encounter will be weighed by heterosexual people for what it is, not for what it isn’t, and what it isn’t is a marriage.

This is not a fight over a word.  It’s a fight for that acknowledgment of our humanity, and to have our human needs and our human dignity respected.  As long as heterosexuals view our relationships as being something fundamentally different from their own, they will treat them as something fundamentally less then their own.  And they will, never doubt it, apply the law as though they are something fundamentally less from their own.  Something other then marriage, is inevitably something less then marriage.  That has in fact, been the documented experience in at least one state, New Jersey.  Nothing should have been less surprising.  It is simply, it is inevitably, because applying two different labels, one to the union of opposite sex couples, and a different one to the union of same-sex couples, establishes that they are different things, and gives people permission to treat them as different things.  And as long as people believe they have that permission in the spirit of the law, they will use it regardless of the letter of the law.

There is no ‘but’ in equal.  We know who our friends are.  They are the ones who may worry about a backlash, may question tactics and means, but not that the fight is necessary and just.  They understand that love is something to be cherished and defended from hate, not compromised in the face of it.   They know how important it is to us to defend the honor and the dignity of our love, because they can look at us, and see people not unlike themselves and they would do the same in our shoes.  We are not damaged goods.  We are friends and neighbors.  Fellow citizens of the American Dream.  Shallow understanding, is no understanding at all.  It is the person that is shallow, not the understanding.  All it takes to understand why we fight, is to have ever loved someone.

To the folks who don’t want to fight this as an all or nothing battle: I’m sorry.  Nobody should have to grow up and go through life taking one wound to the heart after another.  This fight tears people apart.  I’ve seen it.  I hate it.  I don’t blame you for not wanting to deal with it.  But you need to understand this: you found yourself in an all or nothing battle with hate, the moment you first realized that you are gay.

[ Edited a tad…]