A couple weeks ago I started seeing headlines like this popping up in my Google News page…

Gay-rights activists switch strategies on marriage

Let me guess…

Aronda Kirby and Digit Murphy were once married to men, received the tax breaks for married couples and were legally permitted to take family leave if their husbands or children got sick.

Both women lost those protections when they came out as lesbians, divorced their husbands and set up a new household together with their six children.

Now, with couples like Murphy and Kirby in mind, some gay-rights advocates who previously fought for "marriage or nothing" are shifting strategies. Rather than fighting to legalize marriage for same-sex couples, they’re lobbying for the protections marriage provides.

Uh, huh…

They say they are testing whether lawmakers who summarily reject gay marriage will approve rights that enjoy more popular support.

No, and no.

This debate about whether spending our time and money and effort working to secure equal marriage rights or not is like a bad penny.  It keeps coming up after every bitter setback we have to endure, and I guess the pain of having your hopes dashed time after time after time makes people forget why we got to this place in the first place.  It is not because we got too cocky and overreached.  It is not because we decided to go for it all rather then taking the careful incremental approach.

This is why incrementalism won’t work:

Hospital Visitation For Gay Partners Considered

(WCCO) Minneapolis Being able to visit a loved one in a hospital is something many can take for granted. Gay partners say they can be denied access to their partners in critical situations.

A Senate committee will soon consider a new law that would guarantee that access at all hospitals.

"When someone takes their partner to the emergency room and they’re asked ‘what’s your relationship to this person?’ and they respond ‘I’m their partner’ and the nurse puts up her hand and says stop, your not family. You can’t go beyond this door,” said Ann DeGroot, who represents the gay rights group Out Front Minnesota.

Conservative groups are fighting the proposal. Their concern is not about visitation, but putting anything into law that acknowledges same sex partnerships.

"What we object to is the creation of these domestic partner statuses, which is really marriage by another name and that’s what we see they are attempting to do”, said Tom Prichard of the Minnesota Family Council.

Gay rights groups contend it isn’t about gay marriage, but support at a critical time.

“This is just a bill that has to do with something that we know could make people’s lives better”, DeGroot said.

Right. And you think the religious right and their republican enablers want to make the lives of gay people Better…?  You’re wrong DeGroot…this bill Is about gay marriage, because that’s what the religious right has already made it.  Without a doubt every politician in the state can see what the next round of attack ads will look like.

Probably something like this…

This is what the Republican National Committee was mailing out to voters in 2004.  Or maybe it’ll look like these little charmers the republicans spit out in the New York 7th district race against Craig Johnson…

I’m 53 years old, which I guess is about 200 in Paul Cameron years, and I’ve lived this struggle for equal rights since I was 17 years old, and I tell you that our enemies will turn Everything We Do, to win Any Little Crumb off the table our heterosexual neighbors take for granted, into a fight over same sex marriage.  It is the trump card they know they can use to short-circuit debate about any bill relating even remotely to gay people, their way of scaring the politicians and inflaming passions among the voters.  When the Supreme Court ruled in Lawrence v. Texas that the sodomy laws were unconstitutional, the very first thing the kook pews began howling about was that it would lead to same sex marriage.  But as far back as the early 1980s, when some gay rights groups in a few states were agitating for hospitalization rights, to prevent what happened to Karen Thompson and Sharon Kowalski and Juan Navarette, our enemies were bellyaching that giving us hospital visitation rights would lead to same sex marriage. 

Of course they weren’t then, and aren’t now interested in protecting the institution of marriage, so much as insuring that this kind of bleeding heartache never stops happening to gay people:

Juan [Navarett] and Leroy [Tranton] lived together in Long Beach for eight years. One day, Juan came home from the grocery store and found Leroy, who had fallen off a ladder, lying on the concrete patio. Leroy was rushed to the hospital where he stayed in a coma for several days. Although Leroy regained consciousness, he remained hospitalized for nine months. Juan visited Leroy once or twice each day, feeding him and encouraging him to recuperate.

Leroy’s estranged brother, who lived in Maine, filed a lawsuit seeking to have himself appointed as Leroy’s conservator.

When Juan accidentally found out, he showed up at court in Long Beach. Although Juan, who was not represented by counsel, stood up and protested, the judge refused to consider Juan’s plea because he was a stranger to Leroy in the eyes of the law.

The brother subsequently had Leroy transferred from the hospital to an undisclosed location. When Juan finally discovered that Leroy was being housed in a nursing home about 50 miles from Long Beach, he attempted to visit Leroy there. The staff stopped Juan in the lobby, advising him that the brother had given them a photo of Juan with strict orders not to allow him to visit Leroy. Unfortunately, no one else ever visited Leroy there.

It took Juan about two weeks to find an attorney who would take the case without charge. The attorney filed a lawsuit seeking visitation rights.

A few hours before the hearing was scheduled to occur, the brother’s attorney called Juan’s attorney, informing him that Leroy had died three days before.

Since the body had already been flown back to Maine where it was cremated, Juan never had an opportunity to pay his last respects.

Normal people might feel a twinge of conscience that such things could happen to couples in love, might even feel a bit of disgust at gutter crawling maggots like Tranton’s brother.  But when bills giving same sex couples visitation rights were introduced in Sacremento, after Juan Navarette was denied his lover’s bedside, and then his grave, the religious right and the republicans turned it into a debate about same sex marriage.  It was an eminantly predictable response back then.  And…oh look…It Still Is Today.

And you know…they’re right.  If it makes sense to give same sex couples some rights, Any rights, as a couple, why doesn’t it make sense to give them all the rights heterosexual couples enjoy?  Children?  If marriage was about children then why isn’t having and raising them a requirement?  Social stability?  What’s so socially stabilizing about placing some people’s love and domestic lives outside the protections of the law, while embracing others?  While some in the religious right have tried to split that hair the hard core base has always understood perfectly well that it cannot be split.  If homosexuals Can love, and if the love between same sex couples is as deeply felt, and as meaningful, and as life affirming to them as the love opposite sex couples experience…then what in God’s Name have we been doing to them all this time?

They can’t give an inch on that.  It Must be, it Has to be, homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex.  Otherwise they’re done for, and they know it.  So they will, they must, turn every bill seeking to grant same sex couples any rights whatsoever, into an argument about same sex marriage.

There are those in the gay community who absolutely detest the concept of same sex marriage.  They regard it as assimilationist, as selling out, as a betrayal of the 60s promise of sexual liberation.  Fine.  Whatever.  Whether you like the concept or not, whether or not you think we can or should spend our time and energy fighting for it, the fact is that we will be fighting over same sex marriage for as long as this civil rights movement has to go on, whether we want to or not, whether we even Like the idea or not.  Every time we go to the statehouse, every time we go to Capital Hill, every time we take it to the streets, regardless of what we’re fighting for, whether it’s visitation, or equal access to jobs, housing, medical care, goods and services, whether it’s the right to be safe in school, or on the streets, regardless of what it is, we will end up fighting about the right of same sex couples to marry.  Because the politician that so much as gives us the time of day, is going to be facing the likes of this in the next election:

The simple logic of it is this:  If Adam and Steve can slow dance together with all the other couples, whether it’s in a gay bar or at Disneyland without being hauled off to jail for it, then there is no good reason not to let them marry too if that’s what they want.  Our enemies have always understood this.  It was never simply about sex.  It was always about the honor and the dignity of our love.  From the moment a group of young gay street kids, drag queens, and fed-up bystanders started throwing rocks at the police in front of the Stonewall Inn, we have been in a fight for the right to marry.