The Western Mass. chapter of Equality Across America held a rally on the steps of Northampton city hall this week to demand that Congress pass a transgender-inclusive Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA). One controversy surrounding this bill is the willingness of some gay-rights groups to accept a version that would not cover discrimination against transgender employees. They argue that a compromise bill would be easier to pass; however, the trans community is legitimately concerned that a stand-alone trans rights bill, if introduced separately at a later date, would never gain enough support.
There’s still a lot of misunderstanding of transgender people, probably because they’re even rarer than gays and lesbians, and often look different from the mainstream. On the issue of gay and lesbian rights, our society is slowly getting the idea that it’s wrong to stand in the way of marriage and family formation. We can relate to the anguish of being separated from the people we love. It’s less common to feel desperately out of sync with the gender expression that society expects from us. (Or at least, we don’t admit it, as we cram our feet into pointy high heels and nip and tuck ourselves to death!) As I get to know more people in the transgender community, and get in touch with my own discomfort with sexual stereotypes, I’m beginning to understand why the right to choose your gender expression is a basic human right.
Equality Across America is best known for organizing the National Equality March in Washington, D.C. last October. Their next planned action in our region will be the May 22 rally at the State House in Boston, urging passage of the long-stalled legislation that would add gender identity and expression to the Massachusetts civil rights law. If you live in our state, fill out the MassEquality web form to tell your elected officials to bring this bill to a vote.
Wherever you live, contact your representatives and senators today and tell them that you support fully inclusive federal protections for GLBT workers!
I took these photos with my BlackBerry while sitting on the City Hall steps holding my protest sign.
Lorelei Erisis, Miss Trans Northampton 2009, was our charismatic emcee.
Co-organizer Gary Lapon (not pictured) is a Socialist activist, so our rally included signs for workers’ and immigrants’ rights.
Lorelei and Elle St. Claire spoke eloquently for equal rights.
Co-organizer Madeline Burrows with Elle’s proud wife Jessica.
Bet Power, curator of the Sexual Minorities Archive, a local treasure trove of GLBT history.
Yesterday was the 29th annual Northampton Pride March. Thousands participated, including numerous church groups and gay-straight alliances from local schools, and thousands more lined the sunny streets of downtown Northampton to cheer us on. My family and I marched with the MassEquality contingent, waving “Trans Rights Now” signs calling for action on the pending bill that would add gender identity and expression as protected categories under the Massachusetts civil rights law. Over a dozen members of our parish also marched under the St. John’s Episcopal Church banner.
The photos below marked with “(AC)” were taken by my husband, Adam. The others are mine.
My proud family: Adam, Roberta, and Karen.
The Episcopal Church welcomes YOU! (AC)
Preaching the gospel.
Some fans of the Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Bullies? No problem. The Northampton High School Gay-Straight Alliance has “Gayzilla” on their side!
The Boston Sisters Convent of the Commonwealth, an order of queer nuns, bring their big-city style to Northampton. Visit their website at thebostonsisters.org .
Signs of the times.
The awesome people of St. John’s!
Our former deacon Eric (we miss you!), our beloved Rev. Cat Munz, Cat’s husband Bill, and fellow parishioner Barbara.
Some marchers connected the gay-rights struggle to other forms of oppression. (AC)
Some of our beauty queens are girls! (AC)
The parade begins from Lampron Park, next to the historic Bridge Street Cemetery. (AC)
We marched down Bridge Street in front of the band. (AC)
Throngs of supporters outside the old courthouse on Main Street.
A very well-attended parade! (AC)
More fans greet us outside City Hall.
Entertainers at the end of our parade route. Northampton is (or should be) known for its hula-hooping talent.
A radical faerie and some folks from the Baystate Medical Center group. A large number of Baystate employees, gay and straight, marched with their families.
Well…Pride is over for another year…leaving me with only happy memories, 200 photos and a bad sunburn. We are so blessed to live in a community where love and diversity can be celebrated in public, and haters don’t dare to counter-protest with their false interpretations of Jesus’ teachings.
But even here in the Happy Valley, there are still churches that preach that gays have an “evil spirit” on them. There are still kids who suffer from anti-gay bullying in their schools. There are still teenagers who think it’s funny to yell epithets at a same-sex couple walking hand in hand.
The collective power we showed yesterday is not visible enough in ordinary life. Too often, a GLBT person or straight ally feels alone in confronting his or her closed-minded community.
What if everyone who marched or cheered yesterday’s Pride march made a commitment to themselves to do something to fight homophobia this year? What would the world look like when Pride comes around again next May?
My praise goes out today to the courageous and talented singer Jennifer Knapp , a star of the contemporary Christian music scene, who has come out as a lesbian and a person of faith. The Grammy nominee and Dove Awards winner stopped recording in 2003, and now her fans know why.
Though she is no longer on a “Christian” record label, her statements to the media suggest that she still considers herself a believer. The evangelical magazine Christianity Today ran an exclusive interview that is sure to cause controversy among its largely non-affirming readership. Though interviewer Mark Moring can’t resist calling her orientation a “lifestyle choice”, I think the magazine still deserves props for giving her a respectful forum to discuss an issue that many would like to pretend doesn’t exist. Here’s an excerpt (boldface emphasis mine):
Were you struggling with same-sex attraction when writing your first three albums? Those songs are so confessional, clearly coming from a place of a person who knows her need for grace and mercy.
Knapp: To be honest, it never occurred to me while writing those songs. I wasn’t seeking out a same-sex relationship during that time.
During my college years, I received some admonishment about some relationships I’d had with women. Some people said, “You might want to renegotiate that,” even though those relationships weren’t sexual. Hindsight being 20/20, I guess it makes sense. But if you remove the social problem that homosexuality brings to the church—and the debate as to whether or not it should be called a “struggle,” because there are proponents on both sides—you remove the notion that I am living my life with a great deal of joy. It never occurred to me that I was in something that should be labeled as a “struggle.” The struggle I’ve had has been with the church, acknowledging me as a human being, trying to live the spiritual life that I’ve been called to, in whatever ramshackled, broken, frustrated way that I’ve always approached my faith. I still consider my hope to be a whole human being, to be a person of love and grace. So it’s difficult for me to say that I’ve struggled within myself, because I haven’t. I’ve struggled with other people. I’ve struggled with what that means in my own faith. I have struggled with how that perception of me will affect the way I feel about myself.
Are you beyond those struggles?
Knapp: I don’t know. I’m the happiest I’ve ever been. But now that I’m back in the U.S., I’m contending with the culture shock of moving back here. There’s some extremely volatile language and debate—on all sides—that just breaks my heart. Frankly, if it were up to me, I wouldn’t be making any kind of public statement at all. But there are people I care about within the church community who would seek to throw me out simply because of who I’ve chosen to spend my life with.
So why come out of the closet, so to speak?
Knapp: I’m in no way capable of leading a charge for some kind of activist movement. I’m just a normal human being who’s dealing with normal everyday life scenarios. As a Christian, I’m doing that as best as I can. The heartbreaking thing to me is that we’re all hopelessly deceived if we don’t think that there are people within our churches, within our communities, who want to hold on to the person they love, whatever sex that may be, and hold on to their faith. It’s a hard notion. It will be a struggle for those who are in a spot that they have to choose between one or the other. The struggle I’ve been through—and I don’t know if I will ever be fully out of it—is feeling like I have to justify my faith or the decisions that I’ve made to choose to love who I choose to love.
Have you ever felt like you had to choose between your faith or your gay feelings?
Knapp: Yes. Absolutely.
Because you felt they were incompatible?
Knapp: Well, everyone around me made it absolutely clear that this is not an option for me, to invest in this other person—and for me to choose to do so would be a denial of my faith.
What about what Scripture says on the topic?
Knapp: The Bible has literally saved my life. I find myself between a rock and a hard place—between the conservative evangelical who uses what most people refer to as the “clobber verses” to refer to this loving relationship as an abomination, while they’re eating shellfish and wearing clothes of five different fabrics, and various other Scriptures we could argue about. I’m not capable of getting into the theological argument as to whether or not we should or shouldn’t allow homosexuals within our church. There’s a spirit that overrides that for me, and what I’ve been gravitating to in Christ and why I became a Christian in the first place.
Some argue that the feelings of homosexuality are not sinful, but only the act. What would you say?
Knapp: I’m not capable of fully debating that well. But I’ve always struggled as a Christian with various forms of external evidence that we are obligated to show that we are Christians. I’ve found no law that commands me in any way other than to love my neighbor as myself, and that love is the greatest commandment. At a certain point I find myself so handcuffed in my own faith by trying to get it right—to try and look like a Christian, to try to do the things that Christians should do, to be all of these things externally—to fake it until I get myself all handcuffed and tied up in knots as to what I was supposed to be doing there in the first place.
If God expects me, in order to be a Christian, to be able to theologically justify every move that I make, I’m sorry. I’m going to be a miserable failure.
Amen to that! Enjoy this 2008 live performance of her song “Whole Again”:
Daddy, daddy do you miss me.
The way I crawled upon your knee.
Those childish games of hide and seek
Seem a million miles away.
Am I lost in some illusion.
Or am I what you thought I’d be.
Now it seems I’ve found myself
In need to be forgiven.
Is there still room upon that knee?
If I give my Life, If I lay it down
Can you turn this Life around, around
Can I be made clean
By this offering of my soul.
Can I be made whole again?
Have I labored all for nothing.
Trying to make it on my own.
Fear to reach out to the hand
Of one who understands me
Say I’d rather be here all alone.
It’s all my fault I sit and wallow in seclusion.
As if I had no hope at all,
I guess truth becomes you
I have seen it all in motion
That Pride comes before the fall.
If I give my Life, If I lay it down
Can you turn this Life around, around
Can I be made clean
By this offering of my soul.
Can I be made whole again?
Can I offer up this simple prayer.
Pray it finds a simple ear.
A scratch in your infinite time.
Not withstanding my fallings
Not withstanding my crime!
If I give my Life, If I lay it down
Can you turn this Life around, around
Can I be made clean,
By this offering of my soul.
Can I be made whole again?
If I give my Life, If I lay it down
Can you turn this Life around, around
Can I be made clean
By this offering of my soul.
Can I be made whole again?
Today’s lesson in straight privilege is brought to you by former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, a contender for the GOP presidential nomination in 2008 and possibly again in 2012. He is also an ordained Southern Baptist minister. In a recent interview with The Perspective, the student newspaper of the College of New Jersey, he repeated the old slur that legalizing gay marriage is equivalent to approving drug abuse, incest, and polygamy. As quoted in the Associated Press:
Huckabee added that his goal isn’t to tell others how to live, but that the burden of proving that a gay marriage can be successful rests with the activists in favor of changing the law.
“I don’t have to prove that marriage is a man and a woman in a relationship for life,” he said. “They have to prove that two men can have an equally definable relationship called marriage, and somehow that that can mean the same thing.”
Thank you, Mike, for defining inequality in a nutshell. We don’t think often enough about burdens of proof and why they fall where they do. More often, we take sides in existing debates without asking how one group seized the benefits of normalcy and whether they ought to retain it.
Do straights deserve to put gays on the defensive because we’re a majority? I thought one of the cornerstones of our American civil religion was the belief, embodied in the Bill of Rights, that the individual has certain fundamental human rights that shouldn’t be subject to majority vote.
Because we populate the planet? The harsh realities of nomadic desert life could explain why the Abrahamic faiths discouraged non-procreative sex, but environmentalists might say we need the reverse incentive now.
Because we’ve done such a good job keeping our marital vows? Three words: 50% divorce rate.
I think many traditionalists refuse to listen to gay-rights arguments because it’s scary to consider that our favorite “natural” hierarchies might be arbitrary and self-serving. Without even realizing it, we’re all somewhat invested in upholding social categories that make us feel better about ourselves.
The Bible has a word for basing our self-esteem on something other than God’s unmerited love for us. It’s called idolatry.
They crucified my Savior upon a common cross.
They crucified my Savior upon a common cross.
They crucified my Savior upon a common cross,
And God’s grace will lead my spirit home.
The following story comes from the April 11, 2010 Associated Press newswire (not reprinted here in full for copyright reasons):
THIES, Senegal – Even death cannot stop the violence against gays in this corner of the world any more.
Madieye Diallo’s body had only been in the ground for a few hours when the mob descended on the weedy cemetery with shovels. They yanked out the corpse, spit on its torso, dragged it away and dumped it in front of the home of his elderly parents.
The scene of May 2, 2009 was filmed on a cell phone and the video sold at the market. It passed from phone to phone, sowing panic among gay men who say they now feel like hunted animals.
“I locked myself inside my room and didn’t come out for days,” says a 31-year-old gay friend of Diallo’s who is ill with HIV. “I’m afraid of what will happen to me after I die. Will my parents be able to bury me?”
A wave of intense homophobia is washing across Africa, where homosexuality is already illegal in at least 37 countries.
In the last year alone, gay men have been arrested in Kenya, Malawi, Sierra Leone and Nigeria. In Uganda, lawmakers are considering a bill that would sentence homosexuals to life in prison and include capital punishment for ‘repeat offenders.’ And in South Africa, the only country that recognizes gay rights, gangs have carried out so-called “corrective” rapes on lesbians.
“Across many parts of Africa, we’ve seen a rise in homophobic violence,” says London-based gay-rights activist Peter Tatchell, whose organization tracks abuse against gays and lesbians in Africa. “It’s been steadily building for the last 10 years but has got markedly worse in the last year.”
To the long list of abuse meted out to suspected homosexuals in Africa, Senegal has added a new form of degradation — the desecration of their bodies.
In the past two years, at least four men suspected of being gay have been exhumed by angry mobs in cemeteries in Senegal. The violence is especially shocking because Senegal, unlike other countries in the region, is considered a model of tolerance….
The article goes on to say that the current backlash in Senegal began in 2008 when a tabloid published pictures of a clandestine gay wedding. Suspected gays were arrested and tortured. Worsening economic conditions also fueled the search for a scapegoat, Cheikh Ibrahima Niang, a professor of social anthropology at Senegal’s largest university, told the AP reporter.
…The crackdown also coincided with spiraling food prices. Niang says political and religious leaders saw an easy way to reach constituents through the inflammatory topic of homosexuality.
“They found a way to explain the difficulties people are facing as a deviation from religious life,” says Niang. “So if people are poor — it’s because there are prostitutes in the street. If they don’t have enough to eat, it’s because there are homosexuals.”
Muslim imams preached in favor of killing gays. The same sentiments were published in Senegalese newspapers and magazines. Some people evidently took the exhortations to heart:
…Around this time, in May 2008, a middle-aged man called Serigne Mbaye fell ill and died in a suburb of Dakar.
His children tried to bury him in his village but were turned back from the cemetery because of widespread rumors that he was gay. His sons drove his body around trying to find a cemetery that would accept him. They were finally forced to bury him on the side of a road, using their own hands to dig a hole, according to media reports.
The grave was too shallow and the wind blew away the dirt. When the decomposing body was later discovered, Mbaye’s children were arrested and charged with improperly burying their father.
In the town of Kaolack three months later, residents exhumed the grave of another man believed to be gay. In November 2008, residents in Pikine removed a corpse from a mosque of another suspected homosexual and left it on the side of the road….
…Among the people who appeared in the photograph published from the gay wedding was a young man in his 30s from Thies. He was an activist and a leader of a gay organization called And Ligay, meaning “Working together,” which he ran out of his parents’ house.
He was HIV-positive and on medication.
When the tabloid published the photograph, Diallo went into hiding, according to a close friend who asked not to be named because he too is gay. Unable to go to the doctor, Diallo stopped taking his anti-retrovirals. By the spring of 2009, he was so ill that his family checked him into St. Jean de Dieu, a Catholic hospital in downtown Thies, says the friend.
He was in a coma when he died at 5:50 a.m. on May 2, 2009, according to the hospital’s records. Although the hospital has a unit dedicated to treating HIV patients, the young man’s family never disclosed his illness, according to the doctor in charge.
Several gay friends tried to see Diallo in the hospital but were told to stay away by his family, says the friend.
When the AP tried to speak to Diallo’s elderly father at his shop on the main thoroughfare in Thies, his other children demanded the reporter leave. One sister covered her face and sobbed. Another said, “There are no homosexuals here.”
Hours after he died, his family took Diallo’s body to a nearby mosque, where custom holds the corpse should be bathed and wrapped in a white cloth. Before the family could bathe him, news reached the mosque that Diallo was gay and they were chased out, says the dead man’s friend. His relatives hastily wrapped him in a sheet and headed to the cemetery, where they carried him past the home of Babacar Sene.
“A man that’s known as being a homosexual can’t be buried in a cemetery. His body needs to be thrown away like trash,” says Sene. “His parents knew that he was gay and they did nothing about it. So when he died we wanted to make sure he was punished.”
Where in this story is the Savior who was crucified? On which side do you think you’ll find him?
“Change is possible,” goes one common slogan of the ex-gay movement. Survivors of so-called reparative therapy counter that while behavioral self-control may be possible, changing one’s core identity is not. For every anecdote that my conservative friends can share about someone who’s been “delivered” from homosexuality, I can point to another testimony from someone who only found peace in their relationship with God after accepting themselves as a same-gender-loving individual.
A similar debate is occurring in a discussion thread at Gay Christian Fellowship, a new website for open and affirming evangelicals. The site’s lead author, Pastor Weekly, shared a video of a woman performing her poem about being freed from lesbianism, hoping to provoke discussion. Some commenters responded that the only deliverance they needed was from the closet, while another visitor respectfully supported the ex-gay poet. A commenter identified as “Kudo451” made these wise observations:
…[A]s deliverance goes I think it is just as unfair for us to assume that her claims of having been delivered are doubtful based on our experience. I am a gay man but I have meet and have friends who are straight or even bi, that have been delivered from a gay lifestyle. Just as I know gay men and women who have been delivered from a straight life style. We are talking about human beings and once we take off the blinders of gender identity and sexuality and even abuse and trauma, you begin to realize that anything is possible.
The problem with most people who claim deliverance from anything is the assumption that what they have been delivered from is bad for everyone’s life. Yet just because God heals a blind man doesn’t mean that such a man has the right to accuse every other blind person of leading a sinful life that cannot glorify God unless they are healed as well. Nor should he accuse those who go blind in life of sinning while using their blindness as proof. I think that is what Jesus spoke of when he spoke of the Eunuchs and also when he spoke of the sick. Prior to Jesus most people felt that anyone who wasn’t “normal” was assumed to be either caught in their own sin or caught in some generational or family related sin (curse). It was Jesus who really changed that sort of thinking for all of Western Civilization, including the heathen.
Sign up for a free site membership to join the discussion. I also recommend their weekly “Voice of GCF” podcasts, which feature in-depth Bible teachings, commentary on current events, and interviews.
A Mississippi federal trial court judge ruled yesterday that a public high school violated a lesbian student’s First Amendment rights by preventing her from bringing her girlfriend to the prom. In a case that has been drawing national attention, the Itawamba County school board canceled the prom rather than allow high school senior Constance McMillen to bring another female student as her date. U.S. District Court Judge Glenn Davidson determined that the ban constituted viewpoint-based discrimination that violated McMillen’s right to free expression.
Mississippi doesn’t ban discrimination based on sexual orientation, and the U.S. Supreme Court has not recognized it as a form of gender bias, so there goes the obvious equal-protection argument. Invoking the First Amendment is a creative move. But is it logical? I could understand it better if McMillen were a transgender student defending her right to cross-dress. Dating seems more like conduct than speech. Being gay is not exactly a viewpoint.
Looking at the big picture, some important protections for women and sexual minorities actually depend on keeping clear definitional boundaries between speech and action. In pornography, violent and medically dangerous acts are sheltered under the umbrella of “free speech” (wrongly, in my opinion) because a camera is rolling, avoiding the restrictions that OSHA would impose on any other hazardous occupation. It’s rotten to get kicked out of your prom, but bullying is a more pervasive problem that GLBT teens face day-to-day. The first national study of cyberbullying of GLBT youth, released last week by Iowa State University, found that more than half of those youth and their self-identified straight allies had experienced online harassment during a one-month period.
In this environment, well-meaning judges should think twice about extending students’ free expression rights beyond their common-sense limits.
The acquisitions staff at our local library shares my passion for graphic novels. The term is a bit of a misnomer because many books in this genre aren’t “novels” at all–they’re nonfiction or collections of short pieces–but it sounds better than “comic books your kids wouldn’t understand”. Below, a brief roundup of some of my latest reading.
R. Sikoryak’s inventive and darkly funny Masterpiece Comicsmashes up the plots of literary classics with the visual style of well-known comic strips. This could easily have been a one-joke wonder, but Sikorsky’s thoughtful pairings give this slim volume an unexpected depth. Reading it, you realize that Charlie Brown actually does have a lot in common with Kafka’s Gregor Samsa; ditto for Beavis and Butthead and the protagonists of Waiting for Godot. You come away appreciating the existential sadness under comics’ forced jollity and limited range of expression, as well as the slam-bang action and excitement buried inside these books we treat so reverently. Maybe high school boys would crack open Wuthering Heights if they read Sikorsky’s “Tales from the Crypt” version first.
The early 20th-century anarchist Emma Goldman is often quoted as saying, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” Seeking an alternative to my feminist friends’ grim suspiciousness of popular culture and fashion, I picked up Sharon Rudahl’s cartoon biography of Goldman, A Dangerous Woman. The book definitely made me want to learn more about Goldman, a feisty and life-affirming woman who put herself at risk to improve the lives of prisoners, prostitutes, and other marginalized people. However, I was a bit disappointed by the presentation. The visual elements didn’t interact dynamically with the text, feeling more like illustrated summaries than true scenes. Since Rudahl relies mainly on Goldman’s own account of her life, the book always casts her actions in a positive light, glossing over difficult moral questions like the anarchists’ use of violence against civilians. A Dangerous Woman is an intriguing introduction to the subject, but I wouldn’t rely on it as the definitive word on this complicated historical figure.
Alison Bechdel is the author of the long-running comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, a witty sapphic soap opera whose humor often arises from the contrast between the characters’ self-righteous political views and their messy personal lives. I binged on 10 volumes of the strip from 1989 to 2005. The left-wing rants sometimes became tiresome, so my favorite characters were the ones who didn’t take themselves so seriously: the gleefully careerist Sydney, a literature professor with a Martha Stewart fetish; Lois, the part-time drag king and full-time sexual dynamo; and Mo’s two Siamese cats, who survey their human companions’ anxious lives with amused detachment.
My highest praise, though, is reserved for Bechdel’s cartoon memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, which is both beautifully drawn and elegantly crafted as a narrative. Fun Home intertwines the author’s coming of age as a lesbian with her memories of her brilliant, enigmatic, repressed father, a closeted homosexual who died in an accident that she suspects was suicide. Drawing parallels to sources as diverse as Joyce, Colette, Proust, classical mythology, and The Wind in the Willows, she shows how their shared love of literature substituted for the intimacy they could never express in more personal terms. Some online reviewers felt Bechdel strained too hard to fit their family story into literary templates, but for me, that was what gave the book its special poignancy: ultimately, Bechdel concludes that there are no neat explanations that will give her closure, and we return to the simple image that opened the story, a little girl in her father’s arms.
I discovered the Scissor Sisters in a (possibly apocryphal) forwarded email in which a conservative pastor was warning parents about cultural influences that would turn their children gay. It’s working.
(The song is only 2:36 minutes but all the videos I could find on YouTube were 3:51 minutes, with an extra minute of dead air at the end. Is it meant to symbolize The Void? Listen and decide.)
Intermission
When you’re standing on the side of a hill
Feeling like your day may be done
Here it comes, strawberry smog
Chasing away the sun
Don’t let those precious moments fool you
Happiness is getting you down
A rainbow never smiles or blinks
It’s just a candy colored frown
You were going on at half-past seven
Now it’s going on a quarter to nine
All the angels want to know
Are you lost or treading water?
And you’re going on your fifteenth bender
But you’ve only got a matter of time
Yes we’ve all got seeds to sow
Not everyone’s got lambs to slaughter
When the night wind starts to turn
Into the ocean breeze
And the dew drops sting and burn
Like angry honey bees
That is when you hear the song falling from the sky
Happy yesterday to all
We were born to die
Sometimes you’re filled with the notion
The afterlife’s a moment away
You want to tell someone the way that you feel
But then you ain’t got nothing to say
You fight for freedom from devotion
A battle that will always begin
With somebody giving you a piece of advice;
By the way you’re living in sin
Now there’s never gonna be an intermission
But there’ll always be a closing night
Never entertain those visions
Lest you may have packed your baggage
First impressions are cheap auditions
Situations are long goodbyes
Truth so often to living dormant
Good luck walks and bullshit flies
When the headlights guide your way
You know the place is right
When the treetops sing and sway
Don’t go to sleep tonight
That is when you see the sign
Luminous and high:
Tomorrow’s not what it used to be
We were born to die
Happy yesterday to all
We were born to die
Two leading US constitutional lawyers, the liberal David Boies and the conservative Ted Olson, have been advocating for the overturn of Proposition 8, California’s gay marriage ban, in federal court in San Francisco. Testimony has concluded, closing arguments are still to come, and a decision is expected this spring.
Venerable PBS talk show host Bill Moyers interviewed Boies and Olson on his Feb. 26 show. Watch the video (49 minutes) here. The transcript and related links are also available on the site. One of the most interesting links is MarriageTrial.com. According to Moyers, the district court would not let the proceedings be filmed, so two Los Angeles filmmakers decided to reenact the trial on their website, with professional actors, using the trial transcripts as their script. So far they’ve covered four of the 12 days of testimony.
The Moyers interview contains many quote-worthy passages. I chose this one because it’s a clever argument that I haven’t heard before. Boldface emphasis mine.
TED OLSON: …You asked me the most effective thing that happened on the other side? I will, I didn’t find any of their arguments effective. I have said from the beginning of this case, I’ve yet to hear an argument that persuades me or even comes close to persuading me that we should treat our gay and lesbian colleagues differently and deny them equality.
But what really happened, which was a very eye-opening event, during the course of the trial, during one of the earlier proceedings. The judge in our case asked my opponent, “What harm to the institution of heterosexual marriage would occur if gays and lesbians were allowed to marry?”
This went back and forth and back and forth. The judge kept wanting an answer. “What damage would be done to the institution of marriage if we allowed this to happen?” And my opponent said, finally, he had to answer it truthfully. He paused and he said, “I don’t know. I don’t know.” That to me sums up the other side. They say the traditional definition of marriage, but nothing by allowing the two couples that were before the court or others like them to engage in a relationship with their partner where they can be treated as an equal member of society hurts your marriage or my marriage or David’s marriage or any other heterosexual marriage. People are not going to say, “I don’t want to get married anymore if those same sex people can get married. That’s not going to happen.” There is no evidence to support a basis for this prohibition.
BILL MOYERS: And yet your opponents kept coming back to the argument that the central reason for Proposition 8, and I’m quoting here, is it’s role, quote “in regulating naturally procreative relationships between men and women to provide for the nurture and upbringing of the next generation.”
TED OLSON: We have never in this country required an ability or a desire to procreate as a condition to getting married. People who are at 70, 80, 90 years old may get married. People who have no interest in having children can get married.
And what that argument does is tip it on its head. The Supreme Court has said that the right to get married is a fundamental individual right. And our opponents say, “Well, the state has an interest in procreation and that’s why we allow people to get married.” That marriage is for the benefit of the state. Freedom of relationship is for the benefit of the state.” We don’t believe that in this country. We believe that we created a government which we gave certain authority to the government. The government doesn’t give us liberty, we give the government power to a certain degree to restrict our liberty, but subject to the Bill of Rights.
So, our fundamental differences there, no one’s stopping the procreational function of people that wish — heterosexual people to get married and have all the children that they want. No one’s stopping that. It is simply allowing people that have abiding affection for one another to live a civil life as your next-door neighbor. The same way you are.
DAVID BOIES: The most important thing is that there’s no connection between gay and lesbian marriage and procreation. It doesn’t limit procreation. It doesn’t discourage heterosexual marriage. In fact, it allows gays and lesbians to raise their children. They’re talking about the children of heterosexuals, okay? Those people aren’t being harmed. They’re ignoring the children of the gay and lesbian couples, who even the defendants in this case admitted were being harmed by Proposition 8. …
