From our Department of Super-Sized Assholes…

Yesterday, the Senate Judiciary Committe held the first-ever hearing on the Uniting American Families Act, which would equalize the status of foreign-born same-sex partners of American citizens. Heterosexual Americans can earn citizenship for their foreign partners by marrying them. Gays, obviously, cannot do that, effectively making a gay American and his or her foreign spouse legal strangers.

Testifying was Shirley Tan, a Fillipino woman who has been with her American partner for 23 years. Together, they are raising twelve-year-old twin boys…

…one of Tan’s children started crying within seconds of the start of her testimony. At the sight of this, Judiciary Chairman Pat Leahy stopped the hearing and asked Tan if her son might want to sit in another room, where presumably a Senate staffer would console him for the duration of what was clearly an emotionally fraught experience. For most people, the sight of a 12-year-old boy in tears at the prospect of his mother being deported halfway around the world would invoke some sympathy. Unmoved, however, was Alabama Republican Jeff Sessions, ranking minority member of the Committee and the only Republican to bother to attend the hearing. At the sight of the weeping boy, according to a Senate staffer who was at the hearing, Sessions leaned towards one of his aides and sighed, "Enough with the histrionics."

Take Note:

Sessions opposes the bill, stating that it would amount to a federal recognition of same-sex marriage.

I keep drumming on this but it’s a simple fact: Everything we have ever asked for in this fight, from hospital visitation to the repeal of the sodomy laws amounts to recognition of same-sex marriage if you listen to our enemies.  This has always been their trump card in Every Fucking battle over any and everything: turn it into a fight over same sex marriage.

So it makes no sense to say that we are wasting energy fighting over same-sex marriage when we could be putting our resources into fighting for anti-discrimination and hate crime laws.  Everything is a fight over same-sex marriage.  Which is to say, everything is a fight over the legitimacy of our emotional lives.  The pieces make up a whole at the center of which is a simple question: do gay people experience life the same way heterosexuals do, or do we, as Orson Scott Card would say, merely play house in hollow mimicry of genuine emotions that heterosexuals feel?  

Look at Sessions’ gut level knee jerk response to that kid’s tears again.  Histronics.  He doesn’t believe they are real.  They can’t possibly be.  Because that family is only playing house.  It isn’t a real family.  They don’t have real feelings.  It’s just an act they have convinced themselves of.  Even the kids.  This is the enemy your gay and lesbian neighbors have been facing for decades now.