Those were just a few of the terms hurled my way in 2003 when I said that the Supreme Court’s Texas sodomy decision opened the door to the redefinition of marriage.
When I wasn’t ducking the epithets, I was being laughed at, mocked, and given the crazy-uncle-at-the-holidays treatment by the media. Or I was being told I should resign from my leadership post by some Senate colleagues.
Five years later, do I regret sounding the alarm about marriage? No.
I’m just saddened that time has proved right those of us who worried about the future of marriage as the union of husband and wife, deeply rooted not only in our traditions, our faiths, but in the facts of human nature: as Pope Benedict said, "The cradle of life and love," connecting mothers and fathers to their children.
So sad… So sad… So tell us how were you proven right Rick…
The latest distressing news came last week in California. The state Supreme Court there ruled, 4-3, that same-sex couples can marry.
No kidding? Wow…
Look at Norway. It began allowing same-sex marriage in the 1990s. In just the last decade, its heterosexual-marriage rates have nose-dived and its out-of-wedlock birthrate skyrocketed to 80 percent for firstborn children. Too bad for those kids who probably won’t have a dad around, but we can’t let the welfare of children stand in the way of social affirmation, can we?
OSLO, Norway (AP) – Two Norwegian opposition parties on Thursday backed the rights of gay couples to marry in church, adopt and have assisted pregnancies, effectively assuring the passage of a new equality law next month.
The ruling three-party government proposed a law in March giving gay couples equal rights to heterosexuals but disagreements within the coalition cast doubt on whether it would receive enough votes to pass.
But two opposition parties announced Thursday they were backing the proposals, a move welcomed by gay rights groups, which should ensure a parliamentary majority and allow the law to be passed.
Okay…in other words… Norway suffered a staggering rise in out of wedlock births and an equally staggering decline in heterosexual marriages since it began allowing same-sex marriages in the 1990s, and just one week after your column warning us about that Norway’s parliament announces it is ready to give same sex the right to marry. No you drooling sack of Santorum, Norway hasn’t had same-sex marriage since…it was 1993 since you couldn’t be bothered to check the actual date either. It’s had a form of civil unions.
Okay…fine…so it was civil unions that caused the decline in Norway then…right? Erm…no… You’re waving Stanley Kurtz’ claptrap years after it was debunked you moron. Here…let some fellow republicans slap some wake up upside your head…
Some on the far right claim that the experiences with same-sex marriage in the international community prove that same-sex marriage destroys the institution of marriage. This claim, however, is unsupported by the facts. Stanley Kurtz, of the Hoover Institution, insists, in an article for The Weekly Standard, that same-sex marriage has undermined the institution of marriage in Scandinavia. (Scandinavia includes the countries of Norway, Sweden and Denmark. Much debate on this issue also has included the Netherlands.) An examination of the facts severely undermines Kurtz’s assertion. Professor M.V. Lee Badgett from the University of Massachusetts Amherst recently authored a study examining Kurtz’s conclusion. Click here to read the entire study. Among the report’s key findings:
"There is no evidence that giving partnership rights to same-sex couples had any impact on heterosexual marriage in Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands. Marriage rates, divorce rates, and non-marital birth rates have been changing in Scandinavia, Europe and the United States for the past thirty years. But those changes have occurred in all countries, regardless of whether or not they adopted same-sex partnership laws, and these trends were underway well before the passage of laws that gave same-sex couples rights."
"Divorce rates (in Scandinavia) have not risen since the passage of partnership laws and marriage rates have remained stable or actually increased."
"Non-marital birth rates have not risen faster in Scandinavia or the Netherlands since the passage of partnership laws. Although there has been a long-term trend toward the separation of sex, reproduction, and marriage in the industrialized west, this trend is unrelated to the legal recognition of same-sex couples."
"Non-marital birth rates changed just as much in countries without partnership laws as in countries that legally recognize same-sex couples’ partnerships."
"The legal and cultural context in the United States gives many more incentives for heterosexual couples to marry than in Europe and those incentives will still exist even if same-sex couples can marry. Giving same-sex couples marriage or marriage-like rights has not undermined heterosexual marriage in Europe, and it is not likely to do so in the United States."
The main evidence Kurtz points to is the increase in cohabitation rates among unmarried heterosexual couples and the increase in births to unmarried mothers. Roughly half of all children in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark are now born to unmarried parents. In Denmark, the number of cohabiting couples with children rose by 25 percent in the 1990s. From these statistics Kurtz concludes that " … married parenthood has become a minority phenomenon," and—surprise—he blames gay marriage.
But Kurtz’s interpretation of the statistics is incorrect. Parenthood within marriage is still the norm—most cohabitating couples marry after they start having children. In Sweden, for instance, 70 percent of cohabiters wed after their first child is born. Indeed, in Scandinavia the majority of families with children are headed by married parents. In Denmark and Norway, roughly four out of five couples with children were married in 2003. In the Netherlands, a bit south of Scandinavia, 90 percent of heterosexual couples with kids are married.
Emphasis mine. And you can be sure Kurtz knew that when he published his dire warnings about the effect of same-sex marriage in Scandinavia. After all…he had to have poured over the data in his search for evidence damning gay people. He’d have looked at the entire marriage rate data, never doubt it, and he had to have seen that part. He withheld it because it effectively took away his ammunition.
But more specifically with respect to civil unions, look at what the data tells us:
Before 1993, the percentage of births outside of marriage grew steadily by an average of about 9% per year.
After civil unions were enacted in 1993, the growth of that birth rate slowed dramatically. The the growth rate fell from 9% per year to an average of less than 1.5% per year between 1993 and 2006.
Which means that if there were a cause and effect between Norway’s birth rate outside of marriage and providing civil unions for same-sex couples, the data suggests that civil unions actually had a dramatic affect in slowing the rate of births outside of marriage.
The chart Burroway provides shows the rate climbing since the mid-70s, and then suddenly tapering off after civil unions were enacted. Of course, coincidence is not causality, and the plain fact is that civil unions were probably of utterly no consequence in any sense. Since when did heterosexuals decide how to live their intimate lives based on what homosexuals do with theirs? Is this rocket science?
What happened to change how heterosexuals lived their lives in the 1970s wasn’t gay liberation, but women’s. The pill happened. Women became more independent of men. They could have their own lives. Marriage wasn’t a foregone conclusion for them, the home not the only life they were allowed to have anymore. Given all that, of course the patterns of marriage would change. Opposite sex couples still marry…they just go down a different road to it now…both of them, together, as equals.
And make no mistake…that’s what Santorum and his kind want to change. This isn’t about same-sex marriage. It’s about the prerogative of powerful males. It’s about taking us all back to a day when certain males of a certain class had power and status simply by virtue of their being males of a certain class, and the rest of us, women, minorities, laborers, heathens, knew our place and our lives only had context in service to them. It was once their world, and the rest of us just lived in it. That’s why they fight. Because in this world of ever expanding knowledge, freedom and justice, they are the biggest losers. Where status doesn’t count, you actually have to be something, and all they know how to be, is 18th century privileged males.
Actually Rick, the voters of Pennsylvania gave you a wake-up call when they booted your ass out of office last election. And you’re still walking though life half-asleep, half comatose, aren’t you?
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.
So says Save California, an anti-gay group that is calling asking it supporters to call county clerks and demand that they refuse to issue marriage licenses to gay couples. From their website:
Ask your county clerk if they were a Nazi officer during WWII and had been ordered to gas the Jews, would they? At the Nuremberg trials, they would have been convicted of murder for following this immoral order.
Ask yourself if any of the morally righteous folks over at Save California would have refused to sign an order sending a gay man to the concentration camps. Go ahead. Try not to laugh.
It is astonishing, though, how quickly gay marriage went from being something as unthinkable by most people as legalized polygamy is today, to being considered a constitutional right by high courts, and accepted by roughly half the populace. I was thinking today that there’s a parallel between what happened to the Catholic Church, especially in Europe, in the 20th century — how it went from being apparently strong and vital to facing all kinds of crises in the blink of an eye. As those familiar with the arguments know, there is a tendency among the right to blame the Second Vatican Council, but the truth is if the Church were as strong as she seemed, things wouldn’t have fallen apart so rapidly.
So it is with the institution of marriage. Gay marriage is and is not a sudden shift in the meaning of marriage. It started with the Reformation. The reason I think gay marriage cannot be stopped, only delayed, is because it is only the latest manifestation of deep social trends in the West going back centuries. These currents run so deep in our civilization they carry us all along without many of us being aware of how far from shore we’re receding.
Ah…for the good old days, when heretics, witches and homosexuals were burned at the stake. Dreher has tried, oh so hard in recent months, to seem like a decent man. A love the sinner, hate the sin kind of man. Not a bigot…just someone who has very strong moral values. And then California goes and does this to him. One good thing to come from the California Supreme Court ruling the other day is that reflexive release of stench from that open sewer Dreher’s kind like to call a conscience. We don’t hate homosexuals…honest…really…we just don’t want THEIR PRESENCE DEFILING OUR SACRED INSTITUTION OF MARRIAGE!!! We need to get these from time to time, so we don’t start believing all that crap about them kind actually being anything other then somewhat more publishable in family newspapers then the Westboro Baptist Church.
And Much more verbose. Fred could distill Dreher’s entire column of crap down to a single poster sign that reads: GOD HATES FAG AMERICA. No kidding…go read the damn thing. Dreher is literally calling same-sex marriage a symptom of the inevitable destruction of the west that began with the Protestant Reformation. Take that all you Christian fundamentalists who oppose gay rights. You’re just as much a threat to western civilization as homosexuality as far as Dreher is concerned.
This is why I don’t see any hope of stopping gay marriage. It did not come out of nowhere, but emerged as the working-out of the logic of our civilization and its exaltation of individualism.
You know…all that American stuff about freedom and liberty and justice for all. Why Dreher doesn’t come right out and say that the very existence of United States Of America is a symptom of the inevitable decline of the west too I’ve no idea, other then he likes having that stars and stripes thing on his passport. Oh…and the standard of living in a free country is kinda swell too.
I think the most common, and superficially common-sensical, questions that comes up in discussions of this issue is, "How does Jill and Jane’s marriage hurt Jack and Diane’s?" The idea is that unless you can demonstrate that a gay marriage directly harms traditional marriage, there is no rational objection to gay marriage.
But this is a shallow way to look at it. We all share the same moral ecology. You may as well ask why it should have mattered to the people of Amherst, Mass., if some rich white people in Charleston, SC, owned slaves. Don’t believe in slavery? Don’t buy one.
Look at that carefully. Dreher may seem to be throwing moral relativism back in the face of liberals, but what he’s actually doing is employing it as a weapon. What mattered about slavery was the wrong done to slaves, regardless of who did or did not choose to own any. The question remains, what is the wrong done to Jack and Diane if Jill and Jane are free to marry. But Dreher has an answer for that too…
Redefining marriage to include same-sex partners within its definition radically changes the institution, reinforcing the idea that it has no transcendental meaning, but can be changed at will.
Transcendental meaning. Same sex marriage destroys marriage, by depriving it of its Transcendental meaning. And whatever that Transcendental meaning is, it’s something that only heterosexuals can bring to it. By virtue of their being…well…heterosexual. Whatever it is that same sex couples bring to a marriage, it cannot be marriage because it cannot have that Transcendental meaning. Only heterosexual coupling can possess that Transcendental meaning. Which means that only heterosexual families possess that Transcendental meaning. Because only heterosexual love possesses that Transcendental meaning.
Here…let me decode that: Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. Only now the thinking is we don’t even have that. We only have make-believe sex. Mere genital stimulation. Nothing more then that. Certainly nothing Transcendental. We are shallow, empty beings. Creatures who only resemble true humans. Our hearts can hold none of that Transcendental Meaning that heterosexuals wake up to and regard favorably in the bathroom mirror every morning. Our brief barren assignations are just pitiful imitations of true heterosexual love. And by demanding that our pseudo unions be regarded in marriage as being on the same Transcendental plane as the rich and noble and truly human heterosexual unions are, we do more then mock their genuine human capacity to love…we destroy the institute that enriches and sustains it. And take down western civilization with it. And thus, the Protestant Reformation finally achieves its goal. Praise Satan.
That pretty much sum it up Rod?
Over at Box Turtle Bulletin and Ex-Gay Watch the discussion is about how to reach out to the other side. But you can’t. Not to the other side. To your neighbor…yes. Even if they oppose gay rights bitterly. Neighbors must always be reached out to. But you need to understand this…the other side isn’t the anti-same sex marriage side. Listen to Dreher again. Here is the other side:
This is why I don’t see any hope of stopping gay marriage. It did not come out of nowhere, but emerged as the working-out of the logic of our civilization and its exaltation of individualism.
This is the side that has been bitterly opposed to everything fine and noble a human being could ever become since the caveman days. This is the side that would rather make you bow down to the gods and beg forgiveness for being born with a heart and a brain, then live in a world where the human spirit can soar. Because the sight of everything a human can be, that they cannot, is more offensive to them, more frightening, then a landscape of beaten bent and broken humans in chains. When Rod Dreher accuses liberals of using the rhetoric of slave masters, he’s laughing in your face, and then spitting in it.
It is one thing to reach out to a neighbor, and another to reach out to the one who presumes to be your master. They get only the finger, and that so long as they keep their hands to themselves. So…in the spirit of dialogue…Go Fuck yourself Rod…
You and all the other haters of humanity, and everything fine and noble human beings are capable of, and all the beauty they are capable of making, and giving to one another. I’ve got your decline and fall of western civilization right here you gutter crawling bigot…
And if this image frightens you less then the sight of a devoted loving same-sex couple being joined in marriage in the eyes of the law, never mind your Nazi Pope’s, then you can just go fuck yourself because it isn’t the death of western civilization you are worried about because western civilization isn’t anything to you but a perch to shit and squawk on. You never had to go through anything like this to marry the one love of your life…
…so save your pusillanimous rhetoric about the Transcendental Meaning of marriage for someone who thinks you really give a flying fuck about it more then pissing on the courage of lovers who would walk through fire for the sake of their love. Would you go through the gauntlet gay couples have to go through for the woman you married? Would you hold her hand in public if it meant the two of you might get your skulls bashed in? Would you take her hand in marriage if it meant that someday some fanatic might decide to kill both of you to avenge the institution of marriage and prevent the fall of western civilization? Would you have the nerve to love, if you had to have the nerve gay couples do? I doubt it. Because only cowards try to incite passions toward minorities.
And that’s what bothers you isn’t in Dreher. Not that in our struggle for equality people come to see our humanity after all, but that they’ll finally see what a bunch of runts your kind are. It isn’t the end of western civilization that keeps you awake nights. It’s the end of pretense.
A mural meant to bring people together is causing a rift in the Bastrop community.
The painting in question, a student project completed in 2003, adorns a wall in the corridor leading to the Bastrop High School gym. It depicts the sometimes unpleasant history of the town, showing scenes of a Mexican and Comanche raid and slaves working in a cotton field, as well as unifying visions of children of different ethnicities reaching out to one another.
Bastrop school board members were surprised when almost a dozen district residents who signed up to speak at a community forum Tuesday evening wanted to talk about the mural, some calling for its removal on religious grounds and others with arguments for keeping it up.
…
Bastrop resident Lauren Hansell, who made the original complaint, homeschools her children but visits the school on Fridays to pray with students at the flagpole.
A Christian, Hansell said she wants the mural removed because of the war and slavery scenes and depictions of Buddha and ancient gods. Hansell said girl’s basketball coach Dee Deshay pointed out the mural as a potential problem.
"When she showed it to me, I was like, ‘Oh my gosh,’ " said Hansell, who added that the mural presents a new age idea of peace and unity that could be confusing to Christian students.
Emphasis mine. Hansell waves her finger at the depiction of many faiths in the mural…
Among the images on the mural are an Aztec sun, ancient Egypt’s King Tutankhamen, Buddha and Shiva, a Hindu deity, dancing on a demon of ignorance.
Hansell, who at first interpreted Shiva’s dance as a message in favor of abortion, said laws that bar Christian symbols from public schools should apply to the mural.
Here is the tack being played now by the KulturKrieger: If one religion is kept out of the schools they should all be kept out. But fundamentalist hysterics notwithstanding, Christianity isn’t being kept out of the schools and never has been. Here, the Austin-American Statesman actually does some journalism …
The First Amendment, which bans government-sponsored religious activities even as it protects religious expression from government interference, allows students to pray during school in informal settings, according to U.S. Department of Education guidelines. The guidelines say students have the right to "express their beliefs about religion in the form of homework, artwork, and other written and oral assignments free of discrimination based on the religious content of their submissions."
Valdez, the muralist, said the purpose of the project was to represent the history and cultural unity in Bastrop. Although no one symbol can represent a culture, he said the students chose the mural’s imagery to represent unity.
That’s the problem. That was always the problem. Not that Christianity is being kept out, but that kids of other faiths are allowed to feel welcome…to believe that they are a part of the American fabric too. That was why the fight was waged back in the 50s and 60s to stop public schools from forcing prayer on students. That is why people work hard to this day to keep the fundamentalists from co-opting the American public school system. The public schools are for all children, not some. And that’s because America is for people of all faiths, not the people of one faith.
That idea is anathema to the fundamentalists, who think Jesus smiles every time they spit in a Samaritan’s face. If they can’t beat the heathen children down one way, they’ll try to beat them down another. One way or another, the heathens must be forced to give up their faith. If they can’t be forced into school prayers. Maybe they can be forced into silence.
The point was always to coerce everyone into Christianity. Their brand of Christianity. This is why the depictions of unity on the mural might be confusing to their children. It includes everybody.
Via numerous sources… When the homophobes say gays are obsessed with sex, count on them to describe the sex we are obsessed with in more detail then most gay pornography. So naturally, in the wake of the California decision, we see Peter LaBarbra framing the issues involved in his own demure way…
How Will California Homosexual Couples Consummate their Counterfeit ‘Marriages’?
Oh I suppose they’ll…Go To Disneyland!
Whatever. Here’s how my gay couple consummated the Lawrence v. Texas decision that finally overtuned the sodomy laws…
For someone who thinks same-sex sex is so ugly Peter, you sure do think about it a lot…
I’ll endure lectures on how gays don’t actually want marriage rights from a lot of people…even from some other gay people…but not from another gay person who refers to gays as "same sex-attracted" not once, not twice, but eight times in a single column, as though he just can’t bring himself to utter the word ‘gay’ let alone ‘homosexual’. Still looking for that cure are we…?
When Vito J. Fossella Jr., the soon-to-be boy congressman, stood beside the young girls of a cheerleading squad at the Excelsior Grand catering hall in 1997, it seemed a particularly vivid version of Staten Island pageantry. Mr. Fossella — 32 and with Al Pacino looks — was on his way to becoming the sole Republican in New York City’s Congressional delegation at a spirited party billed as an evening of “pasta and politics.”
George H. W. Bush and Senator Bob Dole were there that night, strolling past the steaming trays of ziti and charging donors $1,000 each to pose for pictures. Sonny Bono was on his way from California to stump with them the next day. Mr. Fossella, the man of the hour, raised his hands, quieted the crowd, then launched into a rousing speech on cutting taxes and championing school choice.
…
Mr. Fossella, victorious with 62 percent of the vote, was so intent on getting to Congress that, according to The Staten Island Advance, he flew to Washington from Newark carrying the morning papers proclaiming his own victory only 10 hours after it was announced.
Once there, he established himself as a reliable member of his party. He voted to impeach President Clinton, followed President Bush’s war policies in Iraq, voted to eliminate financing for Planned Parenthood and supported a constitutional amendment against gay marriage.
And yet many of his Democratic colleagues did not regard Mr. Fossella as an ideological warrior…
Vito Fossella built a career as a staunch "family values" pol, polishing his image in his predominantly Catholic district with a string of anti-gay votes.
He even shuns his gay sister, Victoria Fossella, refusing to go to family events if she and her partner attend, a source close to the family said.
…
As congressman, Fossella voted to prohibit any funding for joint adoptions by gay couples.
He has voted for the Marriage Protection Amendment, a federal prohibition on gay marriage.
He also demanded housing funds be held back from San Francisco unless it repealed its domestic partnership law.
Nice family republican values kinda guy wouldn’t you say?
Oh yes…definitely…
In the nine days since the 43-year-old Mr. Fossella, who has served five terms in Congress, was arrested and charged after running a red light in Alexandria, Va., things have gone from not-so-good to pretty bad, with only a slender thread still staving off the worst.
Within days of his admitting that he was on his way to visit “some friends in Virginia” when he was stopped by the police, the New York tabloids began raising questions about the woman who came to retrieve him from custody, a former Air Force lieutenant colonel named Laura Fay. Then, on Thursday, he released a clipped statement from his office, saying that he had fathered a daughter, now 3, in an extramarital affair with Ms. Fay.
Democratic and Republican Congressional officials are reportedly looking into Fossella’s mysterious and expensive trip to France in 2003 with his mistress, Laura Fay.
It was called a fact-finding mission to La Hague’s nuclear fuel reprocessing plants, according to the Daily News.
However, the Staten Island Republican was the only lawmaker authorized to go. And according to one committee member, it may have been less about nuclear power and more about fueling his relationship with the Air Force legislative liaison officer, the retired colonel who subsequently bore the congressman’s love child.
Should Fosella repay taxpayers for his travel expenses if investigators find he mixed pleasure with business?
Listen for the right wing ‘phobes who bellyached about Tammy Baldwin’s domestic partner being allowed to fly with her, to blast Fossella for flying with his mistress to France on the government’s dime in, 3… 2… 1… Never.
If you have time to manage you’re neighbor’s personal lives it probably means you aren’t paying enough attention to your own. Well adjusted heterosexuals don’t seek validation by trashing the lives of their gay neighbors. When you see someone going on a crusade against homosexuality it’s probably because the stench of their own intimate lives has become too terrifying for them to contemplate. Nobody goes looking for scapegoats if they don’t need any.
During the course of his speech, in which Sorba falsely claimed among other things that Bruce Bagemihl’s Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity was not a "correct study" and had not been cited by other researchers, including Paul Vasey and Volker Sommer (Biological Exuberance was cited by Vasey and Sommer thirteen times), a group of gay folk got up and began chanting and banging pans to drown him out. He eventually had to leave the stage.
Kyle Bristow, the chairman of the MSU chapter of the Young Americans for Freedom, said, "Sexual deviancy poses as a dire threat to our civilization; is an affront to God; corrupts culture with decadence; and is an attack on the institution of the family, which is the crux of our society."
They say the glbt progressives will not allow free discussion of homosexuality, especially by Christians. They compare glbt techniques of silencing Christians to Hitler in the 1930’s. I think the Freepers go overboard. But there is no doubt that the Smith students and the Toledo University President are stifling Christian oppositional speech against homosexuality.
Just like we would stifle speech advocating slavery, anti-Semitism, or racism. When Andy Humm, the host of Gay USA on Free Speech TV, found himself on a TV Talk Show opposite a reparative therapy counselor, he refused to speak with the counselor. Instead he spent the entire time speaking with the host of the show. He wanted to know how the host dared invite such an irresponsible person as the reparative therapist to the TV show. Andy went on and on about how the therapist and others like him hurt so very many people … but he never engaged the therapist … he ignored him completely.
I think Andy’s tactic was brilliant. I have to admit, I think those bloggers who criticized the Smith women were wrong. The Smith lesbian were right on the money. We do NOT need to invite crazy people to our campuses, churches, or civic centers. The whole western world already knows that homosexuality is completely normal. The jury is back, the verdict is in, the case is over. Case closed. Debate over.
The wingnuts can argue among themselves. They can hold the debate right along side an explanation of the world being only 6,000 years old and the earth being flat. Have at it.
Increasingly, one finds people on both sides who object not merely to their opponents’ position but even to engaging that position. Why debate the obvious, they ask. Surely anyone who holds THAT position must be too stubborn, brainwashed or dumb to reason with.
The upshot is that supporters and opponents of gay rights are talking to each other less and less. This fact distresses me.
It distresses me for several reasons. First, it lulls gay-rights advocates into a complacency where we mistake others’ silence for acquiescence. Then we are shocked—shocked!—when, for example, an Oklahoma state representative says that gays pose a greater threat than terrorism—and her constituents rally around her. Think Sally Kern will have a hard time getting re-elected? Think again.
It distresses me, too, because dialogue works. Not always, and not easily, but it makes a difference. Indeed, ironically enough, healthy dialogue about our issues helped move many people from the “supportive – but – open – to – discussion” camp to the “so – supportive – I – can’t – believe – we’re – discussing – this” camp.
Corvino is right of course in the basic idea: dialogue works. But was Sorba engaging in dialogue?
The born gay hoax was invented in 1985 by pro-sodomy activists in effort to overturn anti-sodomy laws by way of minority status.
If that amounts to dialogue, then I suppose so is a burning cross.
Yes…dialogue works. Absolutely. When it’s dialogue. But dialogue has one inescapable prerequisite: good faith. I have three conditions for dialogue with anyone on the other side of the gay rights issue. I think they are reasonable ones.
Stop lying.
Stop lying.
Stop lying.
When you have a talk with someone who angrily waves Paul Cameron’s junk science in your face, and you point out to them how Cameron’s facts cannot be trusted, and they concede the point and stop waving Cameron in your face, but then go on to angrily wave something else just as bogus in your face…yes, actually, you Are having a dialogue. There is a willingness there to at least listen, even if it is a very slight one. They really are engaging you…albeit between bouts of finger pointing at the perverted gay lifestyle. But if that same person later goes on to wave Cameron in Someone Else’s face as though they’d never conceded the point at all when they were talking with you, there was no dialogue. You need to see that for what it is. There was no dialogue. You may have thought there was, but there was no dialogue. And there is no dialogue possible with that person because they are not and never were engaging you in good faith. What was going on there is if Cameron doesn’t work on you, he can still work on someone else. What was going on there is if they can’t make you hate yourself at least they can try to make other people hate you, and if enough people hate you then no matter how proud you are, you will still be afraid.
That’s what’s going on behind the anti-gay mask of dialogue. Not having an open and frank discussion of the issue, but hate mongering. And you need to know the difference because when you sit down with hate mongers, people who have a history of falsifying the evidence, hiding the truth, ignoring the facts, you are elevating them by virtue of your own willingness to be persuaded. You are granting them a status they have not earned, do not deserve, and in any case do not want apart from its usefulness as a tool in their Kulturkampf . They are not interested in being persuaded. They are not interested in listening to you. That measuring gaze in their eyes as you tell them your story isn’t listening. It’s calculating. They are interested in only one thing: demonizing homosexuals. The world must hate us, as much as they hate us. That is all that matters to them. And if they can get you to help them demonize you, so much the better.
This isn’t rocket science. Starting in 2003, various anti-gay sources started peddling, as an argument against same sex marriage, a study by Dutch researchers led by Dr. Maria Xiradou which they claimed proved that not only were gay relationships very short lived, none that lasted longer then a few years were monogamous. And indeed, none of the gay male relationships in that study were long lived, or monogamous. But as Jim Burroway later found out by…well…actually reading the study…that would have been hardly surprising as it was intended to show how HIV infection was spreading through the young gay male population of Amsterdam and the researchers excluded older couples and monogamous couples from the study.
When you see people doing that kind of thing it is telling you all you need to know about the possibility of dialogue with them. You cannot sit down and have a dialogue with someone where you are trying your level best to understand their point of view and tell your own side of the story as simply and as honestly as you can and they are looking you right in the eye and lying through their teeth. That is not a dialogue, and you are being used. It is not that there is no point in sitting down with hate mongers. It’s that sitting down with hate mongers makes them seem like something they are not, and that allows them to keep right on spreading their poison into the dialogue the rest of the human family needs to have.
Earlier this year the Vermont legislature appointed an 11-member Vermont Commission on Family Recognition and Protection to explore the idea of gay marriage and hear how Vermonters feel about it. They conducted hearings all over the state, and something amazing happened. The conversation was civil. There was no cat-calling, no screaming and shouting, no personal attacks. Why? Because the anti-gay opposition boycotted the hearings. They weren’t silenced. They weren’t shouted down. They weren’t censored. They simply chose not to participate, claiming that the hearings were stacked against them. But with the hate mongers out of it, the people were able to have what they weren’t supposed to have, what the hate mongers didn’t want them to have. Dialogue. See how that works?
Religion doesn’t matter. Party doesn’t matter. Education and culture do not matter. Only one thing matters when it comes to dialogue and that is good faith. Unless that one thing is present, there is no dialogue. At best there is only flag waving. At worst, all you are doing is helping hate mongers to destroy the possibility of dialogue. Because, yes, dialogue works. Dialogue brings people together. Dialogue kills hate. And that is why the hate mongers want to be wherever there is a chance of dialogue occurring.
In this country even hate has a right to speak it’s mind. And that’s well and good. Better hate comes out into the open where it can be seen for what it is. But that doesn’t mean we need to engage hate as though it is something it is not. I am perfectly willing to have a dialogue. I am all about dialogue. But if you want to wave your hate flag you will have to do it all by yourself because I was not born into this world just to help the likes of you make people hate me. Here are my conditions for having a dialogue about homosexuality:
Morgan has posted to YouTube the rough cut he currently has of the opening sequence to This Is What Love In Action Looks Like. It looks to be a fantastic documentary when he gets it all put together. And for the first time, people will get a chance to hear Zach speak for himself about what happened to him.
In this clip via the historical footage Morgan managed to dig up, you get a taste of what it was like before the gay rights movement came of age. The captioning Morgan adds to it captures the sense of the times perfectly…
Once upon a time…
There were some monsters…
Everybody was scared of them…
I was a gay teen back in those days, although I spent most of it in a comfortable cocoon of ignorance. But that’s exactly how it was. Homosexuals were monsters. And then one day I realized I was one of the monsters they were talking about. Watching those clips Morgan found brought that whole period of time back to me. And for the haters, it’s still true to this day. We are monsters, not human beings. That is why the Ex-Gay ministries appeared. Not to save our souls, but to impress upon us that we are monsters.
There’s only a small portion of the interview Zach gave Morgan here. And I think I can say now that this is out, that I was privileged to be there to witness and photograph it (I agreed that Morgan would have the copyright to the photos). There is so much I haven’t been able to say these years, biting my tongue while others waved Zach’s first blog post after leaving Love In Action as proof that he had taken LIA’s side of things and ultimately agreed with what had been done to him. And Zach, let it be said, isn’t interested now, and wasn’t really then, in being the center of a media storm. The poor kid just wanted to live his life. When he cried out for help, it was to his friends. That it quickly spread all over the Internet and became an international media storm was as much a surprise to him as to anyone. But he’s smart, he’s got a good heart, and he’s perfectly capable of speaking for himself when he wants to. I think that comes through pretty clearly in the few moments you see of him in this clip.
There will be more of the interview with Zach, and much more of the events surrounding the Love In Action protests, when Morgan finally finishes his edits and premieres the documentary. I have no ETA and I don’t think Morgan does either…he’s working hard on getting it right, because its so important. It’ll be done when it’s done.
And before you ask…yes, I am listed as an Executive Producer on this documentary. But seriously…all a producer does is produce money. The film is 100 percent Morgan’s, and I cannot speak for or about anyone involved in the production or anyone interviewed in it beyond what you can already see here. Morgan and crew can all speak for themselves, and probably will if you ask them. Morgan can be reached Here, at the Sawed-Off Film’s web site. You can see a collection of Sawed-Off YouTube clips Here.
I’m 30 years old, from rural Ohio, and met my German boyfriend in Boston 8 years ago.
We moved to Berlin together when his visa expired, where we lived for 5 years and eventually got married (okay, "entered into a civil union" is more accurate, if not as eloquent). We work online, which affords us a lot of freedom, and have lived in Ireland and now Spain. Thanks to the "Freedom of Movement" policy, I can legally reside anywhere in the EU, because Juergen and I are married. But, I can’t move home.
An American and a German can legally reside in Ireland, Spain and Slovenia, but not America. When I think about it like that, I want to punch a wall.
Trying to explain our situation to my American friends inevitably results in confusion and disbelief. People are truly unaware of the situation gay, bi-national pairs have to deal with. "You could get married in Massachusetts!" Um, no. "You could get Juergen a work visa!" Not likely. "He could marry a woman, and then you guys just, like, live together anyway!" Seriously, a suggestion I’ve heard more than once.
It’s not that people don’t understand our situation — but that they don’t even know it. And, honestly, the chances that we ever move back to the States are getting more and more remote with each year.
Thanks for continuing to expose this problem…
The virtuous god-fearing lying connivers of the religious right have done a bang-up job convincing people that all their attacks on same sex marriage aren’t intended to deny same sex couples any rights so much as preserve marriage as a union of one man and one woman. So a lot of people apparently think that same sex couples aren’t really as utterly bereft of legal standing as they are. You could get married in Massachusetts… Right. And that and a few bucks will get them both a couple Big Macs…but not the right to live together here in the United States. Repeat After Me: The Defense Of Marriage Act. Or, as Peter Sprigg of the Family Research Council put it succinctly…
“I would much prefer to export homosexuals from the United States than to import them into the United States because we believe homosexuality is destructive to society.”
Gotta love that loving the sinner stuff…
I’ve said this before: the only reason I’m as free to move around my own country as I am is because I am single. If I was coupled, the two of us could not travel in or even through most of the states in this union because if something were to happen to one of us it could quickly become a nightmare for both of us. That was the intent. Not to protect marriage, but to persecute gay people for doing what we are emphatically not allowed to do: Fall in love. Commit to one another. Make a life together. If gay people can find love, can find in it peace and fulfillment and joy and contentment, then clearly the righteous aren’t loving Jesus enough.
AoTP: You very seldom, if ever, write about gay and lesbian issues per se. Yet discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation directly affects where you live, since you and your domestic partner — who is Brazilian — cannot be together on any regular basis in the U.S. Do you hold strong views about anti-gay laws in your own country?
GG: The state of American law with regard to same-sex couples is an ongoing disgrace. America is one of the very few countries in the world — along side countries such as China and Yemen — to continue to ban HIV-positive individuals from immigrating. And the Defense of Marriage Act, which prohibits the federal government from extending any benefits (including immigration rights) to same-sex couples means that we put our gay citizens whose partners are foreign nationals in the excruciating predicament of being forced either to live apart from their life partner or live outside of their own country. That is reprehensible.
Most civilized countries, even those that don’t yet recognize same-sex marriage, refuse to put their citizens in that situation. Brazil was a military dictatorship until 1985. It has the largest Catholic population of any country in the world. And yet I’m able to obtain from the Brazilian government a permanent visa because my Brazilian partner’s government recognizes our relationship for immigration purposes, while the government of my supposedly “free,” liberty-loving country enacted a law explicitly barring such recognition.
The difference between a nation with a large protestant fundamentalist population and one with a large Catholic one. The pope can be a raving Nazi bigot and the flock can still know what it feels like to have a human heart.
But it won’t just be the bi-national couples leaving the USA if same sex couples must remain strangers in the eyes of the law…
A new study shows that many lesbian and gay youths, much like their heterosexual peers, expect to have long-term committed relationships and raise families in the future, according to an April 23 press release from Rockway Institute.
The study questioned about 133 gay New York City youths on various topics, including long-term relationships, family, and adoption. Researchers found that "more than 90% of females and more than 80% of males expect to be partnered in a monogamous relationship after age 30." About 67% of males and 55% of females expressed the desire to raise children. In terms of adoption, 42% of males and 32% of females said they were likely to adopt children.
"We seem to be witnessing the mainstreaming of lesbian/gay youth, with many of them wanting exactly what heterosexual youth have always wanted — the whole American dream complete with kids and the minivan," Robert-Jay Green of the Rockway Institute said in a statement. "Most agree that the primary issue is whether these youth will be given the equal legal rights to realize their couple and family aspirations just like their heterosexual peers."
…which they won’t be able to achieve here in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave if the religious right has its way. But they will elsewhere in the civilized world. And this is a generation raised on the Internet. The world is, literally, their oyster. They’ll go where they have the opportunities they need. They may always call themselves Americans. They may always think of themselves as Americans. But if they can’t find their American Dream here in America, they’ll go live where they Can find it.
My generation fled the sticks for the urban centers. In the future, they’ll speak of the gay American diaspora…
Same sex couples in the Australian Capital Territory thought they were going to be treated like human beings soon. Hahahahaha….
Australian Christian groups Monday welcomed a decision by a local territory government to abandon its plans to legalise same-sex civil unions after intervention from Canberra.
The Australian Capital Territory government, home to the national capital, wanted to introduce Civil Partnerships Legislation to allow gay couples to hold ceremonies legally recognising their relationship.
But it was forced to water down the proposal after the federal centre-left Labor government of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said Sunday it would override any such legislation on the grounds that such unions would too closely resemble marriage.
The ACT government will now introduce laws under which gay couples can formally register their relationships, but any ceremony will have no legal recognition.
The Australian Christian Lobby group said it was pleased the federal government had got involved.
"We can’t allow marriage to become a political trophy for two percent of the population," head of the group Jim Wallace told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Trophy. Marriage is a trophy. Not a union between two people in love, body and soul. Not a commitment to love honor and cherish. But a trophy. Well that clears it up doesn’t it?
And here’s another trophy they can proudly display on their mantle…
As the nation’s culture changes in diverse ways, one of the most significant shifts is the declining reputation of Christianity, especially among young Americans. A new study by The Barna Group conducted among 16- to 29-year-olds shows that a new generation is more skeptical of and resistant to Christianity than were people of the same age just a decade ago.
…The study shows that 16- to 29-year-olds exhibit a greater degree of criticism toward Christianity than did previous generations when they were at the same stage of life. In fact, in just a decade, many of the Barna measures of the Christian image have shifted substantially downward, fueled in part by a growing sense of disengagement and disillusionment among young people. For instance, a decade ago the vast majority of Americans outside the Christian faith, including young people, felt favorably toward Christianity’s role in society. Currently, however, just 16% of non-Christians in their late teens and twenties said they have a "good impression" of Christianity.
One of the groups hit hardest by the criticism is evangelicals. Such believers have always been viewed with skepticism in the broader culture. However, those negative views are crystallizing and intensifying among young non-Christians…
…Interestingly, the study discovered a new image that has steadily grown in prominence over the last decade. Today, the most common perception is that present-day Christianity is "anti-homosexual." Overall, 91% of young non-Christians and 80% of young churchgoers say this phrase describes Christianity. As the research probed this perception, non-Christians and Christians explained that beyond their recognition that Christians oppose homosexuality, they believe that Christians show excessive contempt and unloving attitudes towards gays and lesbians. One of the most frequent criticisms of young Christians was that they believe the church has made homosexuality a "bigger sin" than anything else. Moreover, they claim that the church has not helped them apply the biblical teaching on homosexuality to their friendships with gays and lesbians.
Emphasis mine. I can’t imagine where this negative perception of Christianity is coming from…
Because if we don’t bleed, then they’re not righteous. Because if they can’t stick a knife into our dreams of love then they’re not following in Jesus’ footsteps. Because if they can’t turn our lives into a desolate nightmare then how on earth will God ever know how much they love him?
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