Our society has made remarkable progress in the fight for LGBT equality in my lifetime. The repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was completed this year, and most Americans support ending discrimination against LGBT people in the workplace. In 2010, for the first time, two separate polls indicated that a majority of Americans support the freedom of same-sex couples to marry. The well-documented generation gap in support for LGBT rights ensures that anti-equality forces in the United States are ultimately fighting a losing battle.
But as the GOP presidential primary is so vividlyreminding us, much work remains to be done in the struggle for LGBT equality. Of course, the usual suspects in the anti-gay pantheon remain the most vocal exponents of homophobia, but even well-meaning, LGBT-affirming individuals can and often do reinforce homophobia and heterosexism without even knowing that they’re doing it.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve found myself in the following situation: a supportive, well-meaning friend or family member is introducing me and my spouse to someone we don’t know. This person makes the introduction as follows: “Hi, so-and-so! This is John, and this is his [insert occasional awkward pause here] partner [or 'boyfriend,' or 'lover,' or 'friend'] Michael.”
Michael and I have been married for nearly six years. Still, we regularly find ourselves in the situation outlined above. I suspect that people have a wide variety of reasons for using non-marital terms to describe our relationship in social situations. Perhaps they aren’t (or are?) aware of the religious or political views of others and wish to sidestep any potential awkwardness that might ensue. Perhaps they themselves, while outwardly professing to support equality, still struggle silently with acceptance of our marriage. Perhaps they wish to save us from embarrassment or retribution. Even LGBT-identified friends of ours slip up on occasion, introducing Michael as my “partner” or asking me whether my “boyfriend” and I will be able to attend their holiday party. I suspect that in these cases especially, force of habit is the culprit: same-sex couples have been excluded from the rights and privileges of marriage for so long that many LGBTs don’t even think of committed same-sex relationships in marital terms.
However varied the reasons may be for using less contentious terms to describe our marriage, the result is always the same: it denigrates our love, telling us that our marriage is somehow unworthy of the term, inherently unequal and intrinsically less valuable than the marriages of our straight counterparts. It reinforces the still-powerful cultural taboos surrounding LGBT people and our relationships. It implies that honesty about the nature and definition of our relationship is less important than accommodating the prejudice of others. It tells us that it’s best to be silent.
I am not entirely without guilt here, either. Early in our marriage (perhaps due to my Catholic upbringing or the sometimes sadistic nature of Midwestern politeness), I often adapted my own terminology to suit my audience. For friends, family members, and people under 40 I used the term “husband,” but for elderly and conservative people, and in work-related situations, I retreated into the relative neutrality of “partner.” I’m no longer shy about making universal use of the term “husband,” but I’ve still occasionally been reticent to call others out for neglecting to do so themselves.
No more.
I can no longer concern myself with whether or not my marriage makes others uncomfortable. I have to be true to myself, my husband, and the love that we share. I refuse to make any concessions whatsoever to bigotry; from now on, I will correct anyone who disrespects the way Michael and I define our relationship. I will not allow my marriage to be denigrated in my hearing.
Of course, there are some in the LGBT community who make the conscientious decision not to describe their committed relationships in marital terms. I respect those decisions and would never suggest that those relationships are any less equal, committed, valuable, or meaningful than mine. However, decisions about how to define a couple’s relationship are for that couple, and that couple alone, to make. Michael and I define ourselves as husbands (as does the State of Vermont), so referring to us by any other term is a sign of deep disrespect that I, and hopefully others, will no longer tolerate.
This holiday season, when you’re introducing your married LGBT friends at a party, remember to respect the way they choose to define their relationship. Michael is my husband. Get used to saying that, because from now on, I’ll be correcting you if you don’t.
Note: This piece, which can also be found on the Huffington Post, is a retooled version of a post that originally appeared in the Bilerico Project in December 2010.
The American Psychological Association (APA) has endorsed gay marriage ahead of its annual convention in Washington.
With a unanimous 157-0 vote, the APA’s policymaking body approved the resolution on Wednesday.
“Now as the country has really begun to have experience with gay marriage, our position is much clearer and more straightforward – that marriage equity is the policy that the country should be moving toward,” Clinton Anderson, director of APA’s Office on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Concerns, told USA Today.
The other day, Texas Governor Rick Perry made news and excited gay wingnuts by invoking the 10th Amendment and suggesting that, though he personally opposed marriage equality, if another state like New York decided to legalize marriage for gays and lesbians, that was okay with him. Apparently the Wingnuts That Be sounded the alarm and got to the man Molly Ivins used to call Governor Goodhair, because now Perry is singing a different tune:
Texas Governor Rick Perry (R), one of the country’s most prominent defenders of the 10th Amendment, is making an exception when it comes to gay marriage. After initially telling reporters that it’s “fine with me” if states like New York legalize same-sex unions through their own legislature, Perry is pulling a 180 and calling for a Federal Marriage Amendment.
Perry, who is flirting with a presidential bid, clarified his position to Family Research Council president Tony Perkins in an interview.
“I probably needed to add a few words after that ‘it’s fine with me’ and that it’s fine with me that a state is using their sovereign rights to decide an issue,” he said. “Obviously gay marriage is not fine with me. My stance hasn’t changed.”
Follow the bouncing ball here. Rick Perry is a Tenther, which means he is an adherent to the slowest of all Constitutional interpretations, and thus believes that states’ rights are paramount. At least his original stance made sense. But then he went in front of prissy old Tony Perkins and, called on his sins against the butthurtness of anti-gay wingnuttia, “clarified” that he thinks the federal government should override states’ rights on this subject, because remember, y’all: when it comes to hating gays and women and minorities, the hate trumps all principles for wingnuts. It’s sort of like how bigots hate judges, unless a legislature grants rights to the LGBT community, at which point they hate legislatures. The only overriding principle is their juvenile hatred.
Perry did make a meager attempt later in the interview to tie his support for writing discrimination into the Constitution back to his 10th Amendment word salad, but just made it worse in the process. He essentially said that it’s okay to stomp on New York’s states’ rights, but that he’s worried that New York’s decisions would cause poor Texans to someday have to be nice to gay people. Poor, put upon Texans. If only liberals states could influence Texas to stop executing people like it’s going out of style. [It is.] But his statement only proves the point of my last paragraph: wingnuts have absolutely no freaking principles! They love states’ rights, indeed — for their own backwater states. [I live in one of the backwater states. I can talk smack.] Ask them to fight for the rights of liberal states to do what they want? Oh hell no.
Because they are babies and they don’t play well with others. Sorry, Gay Patriot guys: the wingnut, as usual, is not your real friend.
The National Organization for Marriage (NOM) had a good run. The group, led by anti-gay activists Maggie Gallagher and Brian Brown, has been able to demagogue and exploit existing anti-LGBT prejudice and foment new fears by lying about the allegedly negative impact marriage equality would have on civilization.
Unfortunately for NOM, the vote to legalize marriage equality in New York means the jig is almost up. The dead-end desperation was evident in Brown’s response to a question posed by a reporter that asked whether the success in New York could be exported to other states. He called this notion “a joke” and said, “They’ve never been able to win a popular vote.”
True, but until Friday’s New York state senate vote, the gay rights movement had also never won a marriage fight in a Republican-led legislative chamber. Brown doesn’t understand that the landscape has radically shifted.
Indeed, for the first time in history a Gallup poll showed that the number of Americans that support marriage equality crossed the 50 percent threshold (53%). These results were not an anomaly and have been confirmed by several credible, independent polls.
Most worrisome for Brown should be the next generation, which isn’t buying his bigotry. The Gallup poll found that support for marriage equality was most robust between the ages of 18-34, and significantly weaker among those 55 and older. It doesn’t take a clairvoyant to see a precipitous fall in Brown’s crystal ball.
NOM’s primary argument has been that it represents the will of the people. Now that they are increasingly on the wrong side of the public opinion divide, will NOM replace their tyranny of the majority creed with an elitist argument proclaiming that the “moral minority” knows better than the American people?
Another tactic used by the anti-gay crowd is to bleat about the allegedly dire societal consequences of same-sex marriage. Following New York’s vote, Rev. Pat Robertson predicted that America would become the next Sodom: “There isn’t one single civilization that has survived that openly embraced homosexuality. So you say, ‘what’s going to happen to America?’ Well if history is any guide, the same thing’s going to happen to us.”
The politics of fear worked well in the past. Marriage equality was first laughed off as a strange invention created by weird hash-smoking Dutch people and socialist Scandinavians. Next, the fundamentalists sneered at the liberal New England states. Then Iowa happened, placing marriage equality in the heartland. Next, the District of Columbia plopped scary old “gay marriage” right in the center of the nation’s capital. And now we have New York, which overnight doubled the number of people in states with marriage equality. (The Williams Institute reports that 11 percent of the US population now lives in states that allow gay couples to marry)
The American people are wising up to the gloom and doom rhetoric of activists like Rev. Pat Roberson and Brian Brown. They can see the corn is still growing in Iowa. The cows are still mooing in Vermont. The partisans are still causing gridlock in DC. And, of course, Broadway plays will still thrill audiences and Wall Street trading will continue after the first same-sex couple marries in New York.
The clear lack of genuine “consequences” has led some conservatives to reexamine their opposition. For example, commentator David Frum revealed to CNN this week that he now supports marriage equality: “Since 1997, same-sex marriage has evolved from talk to fact. If people like me had been right, we should have seen the American family become radically more unstable over the subsequent decade and a half. Instead – while American family stability has continued to deteriorate – it has deteriorated much more slowly than it did in the 1970’s and 1980’s before same-sex marriage was even thought of.”
New York’s new law will introduce more Americans to same-sex married couples, which will increasingly shed stereotypes and misconceptions. The momentum from the bipartisan vote will further embolden conservatives to back marriage equality with their voices and wallets. New York has also placed the issue squarely within the mainstream, giving greater cover to court justices to rule in favor of marriage equality without fear of getting too far ahead of public opinion.
Finally, the decisive victory has led to increased media pressure on Barack Obama to stop “evolving” and start backing fairness and freedom.
The only downside to our success is that defeated crazies are crawling out of the woodwork. Commenting on one blog, an Arizona man named Bryan Wilcutt said, “Time to lock and load Christians. God has mandated we clean up this mess.” In Lancaster, California, five anti-gay messages were spray painted near a strip mall with warnings such as, “Gays Go 2 Hell” and “Kill All Gays Now.”
There is still an enormous amount of work left to do. However, success in the Empire State means more people will witness the quality of our marriages, which inevitably will lead to greater marriage equality.
This is Jim Garlow, who Jeremy points out was a big mover and shaker in the Prop 8 fight. He spoke at Ralph Reed’s [more on Ralph later today, by the way] “Faith and Freedom Conference” on Friday, and said the following insane thing:
Yeah, those are the same. One involves a child’s parent being burned to death in a terrorist attack, the other involves children with two loving parents who have genitals that don’t conform to Jim Garlow’s sense of compatibility.
I just don’t know what to do with this story, so I’ll let commenters hash it out:
Rabbis from the religious Zionist community have launched an initiative to marry gay men to lesbian women – with some surprising successes.
So far, 11 marriages have been performed. Haaretz conducted an email interview with one such couple, Etti and Roni (not their real names ).
Etti and Roni, both religious, were married five years ago. Though they were honest with each other about their sexual orientations from their first meeting, to the outside world, they portray themselves as a normal heterosexual couple. Today, they have two children, and are thrilled with the results.
So, they’re building sexless marriages, by design, which I can’t imagine is healthy in the long-term for any committed couple. On the other hand, they’re not lying about it like Christian fundamentalists do. Score one for some kind of halfway-there version of integrity?
Gay-lesbian marriages have long been practiced among the ultra-Orthodox, but the current initiative is different in that it stems not from an effort to sweep the issue under the carpet, but from a growing acknowledgment of homosexuality, prompted in part by four organizations for religious homosexuals: Havruta, Bat Kol, Hod and Kamocha.
Harel explained that while secular homosexuals see gay marriage as the solution, religious homosexuals are often unwilling to violate the halakhic prohibition on homosexual sex, and are thus seeking other solutions.
“Most of the couples agree not to have relationships with members of their own sex, but if there are ‘lapses’ once every few years, they don’t see this as a betrayal,” he said. “Generally, it’s between them and their Creator.”
I’d have to say that this falls under the heading “To Each His Own,” but it’s still sad the way that people will allow religious dogma to deny them the fullness of life, including a true, intimate relationship with another human being. The piece mentions that Roni attempted conversion therapy, but of course, it didn’t work, because conversion therapy never works.
Oh, and:
Two of the couples Harel married are now in the process of divorce. And he said he is very worried about whether the children of these experimental marriages will end up suffering.
Sarah Posner reports on the findings of Southern Illinois University sociologist Darren Sherkat, who has compiled the General Social Survey results over the last couple of decades on public support for marriage equality. I’ll let her set it up for you:
Sherkat tells me:
There are no other scientific surveys which have asked questions about same sex marriage over a long period of time. The only other remaining scientific general population surveys are the National Election Surveys, and I don’t think they ever asked a question about that (or if they did it was only in the 2008 version). I can’t stress this enough.
In other words, the GSS is the only survey that shows these trends over time, using face-to-face surveys of respondents (as opposed to telephone polls).
And here’s what support for marriage equality looks like, from 1988 to the present day:
Stunning.
Sarah also addresses the notion that young Conservative Christians are becoming more tolerant. Apparently that is not the case, but it IS true that the younger generations in general are much more tolerant of LGBT equality. That can only mean one thing, and it’s something we already knew: the wingnut churches are driving their young away in droves. Anecdotally, I graduated from a small-ish private Christian school and grew up in a fairly conservative area, and I can think of very few people from that time who still attend church on a regular basis. Surely, there are some who do, but the overwhelming feeling I get is that many stay tangentially involved in church, perhaps when they’re with their extended families, but otherwise, it’s not that big of a deal in their lives. Moreover, I know others who are still very much Christian, but who shun the conservative, evangelical, fundamentalist labels like the plague. I’ve even heard the term “recovering Fundamentalist” thrown around in my age group.
I only point this out because wingnuts are likely to try to scapegoat gays and feminism and the lib’rul culture or whatever else for the fact that their young just don’t buy what they’re selling the way they used to. The fact of the matter is that they did it to themselves, when they made the decision to dig their heels in and refuse to assimilate into modern culture. It’s increasingly difficult to keep young people in churches that teach young earth creationism when the internet is full of actual science. It’s increasingly difficult to keep them hating gay people, and thus worshipping at the altar of Fundamentalism, when their college roommate is gay and they realize that their parents and pastors have been lying to them all these years.
Anyway, we’re winning, is the point. The sharp rise in support shown on the graph is evidence of the tipping point Wayne and I have talked about a lot over the past year. There just comes a certain point where there is too much correct information out there, too much education, for people to keep their fingers in their ears any longer. It will only get better.
Here’s some other stuff you might be interested in:
1. The “Christian Medical Association,” which seems to exist to protect doctors and other medical professionals who are unwilling to do their jobs according to the standards and practices of their chosen fields, is yakking its mouth about how mean the Obama administration is for “weaken[ing] the only federal regulation protecting the exercise of conscience in health care.” Basically, they’re arguing that “faith-based” health care providers [faith healers?] are more likely to give poor medical care to the poor, and they will stop doing so if they’re required to do things like prescribe contraception for the poor. Lots of other whining at that link, so enjoy.
2. NOM came out with a completely BS poll on support for marriage equality. Surprise, this pollster also worked extra-hard to pass Prop 8!
3. It’s official: the new leader of the American Conservative Union (ACU) says that groups that support gay marriage or DADT repeal are not welcome to participate in CPAC anymore. Gays are still allowed to attend, as long as they don’t believe in their own dignity. GOProud, you’re safe! Nah, you’re probably not, but whatever.
4. Are you in a gay relationship that isn’t called “marriage”? Well, now you can say so on Facebook!
CHEYENNE-The Wyoming Senate narrowly voted Friday to stop recognition of same-sex marriages and civil unions from outside the state.
House Bill 74 passed 16-14 after tagging on a last-second amendment guaranteeing out-of-state couples in civil unions access to Wyoming courts.
Because of the amendment, the bill will now head back to the House to approve the changes. The House passed the legislation late last month 32-27.
Supporters of the bill, House Bill 74, said the legislation is needed to resolve a conflict in Wyoming law, which defines marriage as a contract “between a male and a female person” but also recognizes any valid marriage performed outside the state.
A Maryland state Senate committee approved legislation allowing same-sex marriage Thursday afternoon, allowing the bill to move to the full Senate floor for a vote.
The Judicial Proceedings Committee passed the legislation in a 7-4 vote.
Already, gay rights activists are rallying state senators in order to gain the 24 votes needed to pass the same-sex legislation in the Senate and move it to the House of Delegates.
Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr. (D-Calvert) predicted that the bill will pass, although with a close vote, in the Senate.
[...]
Supporters of the bill believe if it makes it to the House, state delegates will approve the legislation and pass it on to Gov. Martin O’Malley.
O’Malley has pledged to sign the same-sex marriage bill into law.
The National Organization for Marriage (NOM) had a good run. The group, led by anti-gay activists Maggie Gallagher and Brian Brown, has been able to demagogue and exploit existing anti-LGBT prejudice and foment new fears by lying about the allegedly negative impact marriage equality would have on civilization.
