same-sex marriage – Page 5

Looking for a Diagnosis

Behaviors that mystify and depress me:

A few days ago, the news carried a poignant story about an Ohio man named John Arthur. Arthur is in the terminal stages of Lou Gehrig’s disease, and is dying. He and his partner of twenty-plus years recently flew to Maryland together, in a specially-equipped aircraft, in order to be legally married before Arthur died, something their home state of Ohio would not permit. According to news reports, Arthur was unable to rise from his hospice bed.

When they returned to Ohio, they won a court decision that allowed Arthur to fulfill his dying wish. As Think Progress reported:

In his final days, Arthur wants to honor his commitment to his husband. He wants his own death certificate to list Obergefell as his “surviving spouse.” And he wants to die knowing that his partner of 20 years can someday be buried next to him in a family plot bound by a directive that only permits his lawfully wedded spouse to be interred alongside him. And, on Monday, a federal judge ruled that Arthur should indeed have the dignity of dying alongside a man that Ohio will recognize as his husband.

And now, Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine (R) wants to take that dignity away from Mr. Arthur. The day after a judge issued a temporary restraining order requiring Ohio to list Arthur’s husband as his “surviving spouse” on his death certificate, DeWine announced that he would appeal this decision and try to strip a dying man of his final wish.

The judge’s order is limited exclusively to Arthur and Obergefell. Indeed, as the judge explains, “there is absolutely no evidence that the State of Ohio or its citizens will be harmed by the issuance” of an order requiring Ohio to acknowledge the two men’s marriage. “No one beyond Plaintiffs themselves will be affected by such a limited order at all.”

Closer to home, a relative I dearly love has been in a same-sex relationship for 5 1/2 years. From all indications, the relationship was mutually-supportive and loving. The only issue that has troubled them has been the refusal of her partner’s parents to accept the fact that their daughter is gay. When it appeared that she would not “grow out” of “this phase,” they issued an ultimatum: renounce what you are and terminate this relationship, or we will no longer consider you our daughter. She acquiesced.

My relative is heartbroken, and I ache for her, but I know she will eventually find someone less conflicted. My deeper sympathies are for the girl torn between her family and her identity–the girl without the inner strength to be who she is in the face of her family’s twisted and selfish “love.”

I don’t understand people like these. I don’t know what it is that makes them so vicious and judgmental, so willing to hurt other human beings who are just trying to live their lives. I don’t understand politicians who define success by how well they can marginalize and demonize other people. I especially don’t understand parents who would reject an accomplished and dutiful child simply because she loves differently–parents who would consign a child to a life of pretense and loneliness rather than reconsider beliefs that are already headed for the dustbin of history.

There must be a psychiatric diagnosis that explains these poor excuses for human beings, but I don’t know what it is.

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Democracy and Liberty Continued…

Indiana’s very “Christian” Governor has come out (no pun intended) in favor of letting Hoosiers vote on whether the state should recognize same-sex marriages. He has also disclaimed any intent to discriminate–why bless my grits, honey, he’s all in favor of people choosing their own lifestyles! Surely it can’t be discriminatory to deny civil recognition to non-biblical unions, even if that recognition does carry with it 1030+ rights and privileges.

After all, what’s a little tax inequity among friends?

As a member of Indiana’s legislature assured me the last time I testified against HJR 6 or whatever the number was–there is absolutely no discrimination involved here. The same marriage laws apply to straight and gay people–they can all marry people of the opposite sex.

And rich and poor people alike are prohibited from sleeping under bridges.

The problem with voting on a constitutional amendment that would deny certain people rights that our laws deem to be fundamental is that–in our system, under our Constitution–rights are not subject to the whims of the majority. That’s why they are rights, rather than privileges. No one said it better than Justice Jackson, in West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette. In my all-time favorite Supreme Court quote, Jackson wrote

“If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein..The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts. One’s right to life, liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections.”

Presumably, Governor Pence and Brian Bosma both slept through Constitutional Law. Although I have a sneaking suspicion that they might suddenly remember this principle if they faced mean-spirited, politically-motivated efforts to vote on their fundamental rights.

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I Should Probably Stick to the Comics….

I love leisurely Sunday mornings. I still get the newspapers (Star and New York Times) on paper, and while I have long since gone to electronic receipt of the “funnies,” I will never be as comfortable with online formats as I am with old-fashioned newsprint.

That said, it’s impossible to read the news without being forcibly reminded how quickly and dramatically the world is changing, how complicated our reality is, and how difficult it is for many of us to accept those changes or deal with them.

Three totally different articles from today’s Star underscored the pace of change, the resistance to it, and not incidentally, our need to be sure we are asking the right questions in order to deal with it.

Least important, but telling, was the Varvel cartoon portraying the upcoming arguments over same-sex marriage in the Indiana General Assembly by drawing a castle with a moat around it. I’m not entirely sure what he thought he was saying with this image–presumably that our legislature is impervious to outside opinions–but it inadvertently (and accurately) portrayed our lawmakers as residents of the 17th Century.

The question is, how do legislatures or citizens who are firmly ensconced in the past deal with things like bitcoins? The business section had a fairly lengthy article about this new currency, composed of nothing more than computer code, and not backed by the “full faith and credit” of any government. This is one of many spontaneous new ways of doing business via the internet, a method that allows for anonymity and avoids the problems of foreign exchange. Its value is entirely determined by market forces (and that value has been extremely volatile). I have no idea whether bitcoins are a harbinger of our future, or an experiment that will fizzle–but the very concept has to be unsettling to the “gold standard” folks who populate talk radio and TV and are currently encouraging everyone to buy gold or trade in their paper money for silver coins. If they still don’t understand that money gets its value from people’s willingness to accept it, they are going to have a lot of trouble dealing with bitcoin and its progeny.

Less arcane, perhaps, was the article about rapidly changing attitudes toward marijuana. I’ve written before about the insanity of our drug war, and evidently, a lot of people have come to realize how self-defeating our approach to drug use has been. The problem is, as the article demonstrated, we are still asking the wrong questions–still in thrall to an approach that fails to distinguish between use and abuse.

Both sides of this debate are drawing wrong conclusions from wrong questions. The reason attitudes about pot are changing is that so many people have used marijuana occasionally, much as they have a drink or two occasionally, with no deleterious effect. That leads them to believe pot is harmless and should be legalized. Opponents of legalization point to the (relatively few) addicts, and see danger.

This focus on the substance being abused misses the point. People with addictive personalities can abuse anything–alcohol, tobacco, freon from the air conditioner, grandpa’s heart medicine, inhalents…It is literally impossible to ban everything someone might abuse. With alcohol and tobacco–thanks less to common sense and more to corporate lobbyists–we’ve found a workable middle ground: we regulate, tax and inform. And it works; in most places, it is much easier for teens to get drugs than it is for them to buy alcohol. (As one drug war critic noted, when was the last time you saw the owner of the local liquor store hanging around the schoolyard saying “Psst, kids. We got a new shipment of Stoly in today”?)

The world isn’t only changing. Thanks in no small part to science and technology, it’s getting more complicated.

If we stay in that 17th-Century castle protected from reality by a moat of our own construction, we’re not going to be able to deal with 21st Century challenges.

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An Interesting Observation

I attended a small political gathering yesterday, and during the “mixing and mingling” had a conversation with a member of the Indiana House. We were discussing the legislature’s refusal to allow Indianapolis to hold a referendum on public transportation, and she noted that the same people who don’t believe Indianapolis residents can be trusted with that vote are among the most vocal proponents of “letting the people decide” whether Indiana should constitutionalize its ban on same-sex marriage.

Evidently, we aren’t capable of deciding whether to pay for better bus service, and it would be dangerous to put such a serious matter to a vote; however, we are perfectly capable of deciding whether other citizens should be denied equal access to a fundamental human right.

Tell me again–how did we elect these people?

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The Personal and the Political

There has been a flurry of publicity in the wake of Ohio Senator Rob Portman’s announcement that he has changed his position on same-sex marriage. Portman had been a reliable vote for pro-discrimination measures—he’d supported DOMA and voted for a Constitutional amendment to declare marriage a union between one man and one woman, among other things. Now, he is the only Republican Senator to support marriage equality. So what changed his mind?

His son came out.

Critics immediately pounced. The criticisms focused on the fact that Portman was perfectly willing to demonize and disenfranchise people he didn’t know—that it was only when disparate legal status hit closer to home that he was willing to re-examine his previous positions. Some speculated that he had never really been a “culture warrior”—he had never led the charge against GLBT folks, only voted the party line—but that he’d been willing to parrot the homophobes in his party (and not so incidentally pander to the GOP base) until the policies hit close to home.

Others in the gay community were more willing to welcome Portman to the side of the good guys, essentially arguing “better late than never.” If it took a personal connection to the issue to usher Portman out of the dark side, so be it. At least he made the move. And he clearly loves and accepts his son. (A reporter asked Rick Santorum how he would react in a similar situation, and the answer was far less affirming.)

My own reaction is that Portman’s intellectual honesty is irrelevant. If there is anything that this most recent conversion proves, it is the wisdom of the tactic of coming out—the broad and lasting political impact of thousands of acts of personal courage over a period of many years.

I remember the time when most gay people were firmly in the closet—when a chance encounter with one of my sons’ high school teachers when my husband and I met friends at a local gay bar clearly terrified him. Had I mentioned the encounter, he could have lost his job. In that world, a bigot like Jesse Helms could credibly claim that he’d never met a gay person. In the popular imagination of the time, gay men wore feather boas and danced in gay bars. Gays and lesbians were exotic “others,” and easy to demonize.

Coming Out as a deliberate political tactic changed that forever.

Younger gay people may still dread coming out to their friends and families, but the environment they face is dramatically more accepting than it was ten or twenty years ago. For that, they owe an earlier generation a great debt of gratitude. A generation ago, coming out took tremendous courage. You could lose your job, your friends, your family. The thousands who took that risk, however, put a face on what had previously been faceless. Suddenly, gays weren’t some deviant and foreign species—they were your doctor, your nephew, your Aunt Gladys and her “roommate” of 30+ years. They were people you knew and loved.

They were Ellen DeGeneris and Anderson Cooper and Rachel Maddow.

In the early days of the Women’s Movement, a favorite saying was “The personal is the political.” Each of us has the power to change social norms—one person at a time, confronting injustice, makes a difference. The enormous cultural shift that has occurred as a result of thousands of GLBT folks coming out is proof that the slogan is true.

At the end of the day, do we really care whether Rob Portman casts a vote for equality because he has weighed the equities of the situation and recognized that it is the just and moral thing to do, or because he loves his son?

I don’t think so.

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