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Essence magazine, the magazine for professional black women, is this month featuring its first ever lesbian couple in the Bridal Bliss section. As surprising as that is, (don't hold your breath waiting for Ebony to go there) even more surprising is how overwhelmingly positive the comments are. So far. But black LGBTs aren't out of the woods yet within their own community.
PEW has found that white support for gay marriage has increased; those "for" and "against" are now evenly matched as consciousness-raising over the issue works its magic. Negroes remain unmoved, however: "In 2010, just 30% of non-Hispanic blacks favor gay marriage while 59% are opposed. From 2008 to 2009, 28% of blacks favored same-sex marriage and 62% were opposed."
So, for those of us who support same-sex marriage and are hoping to convince blacks of the same, we'd best remember MLK's words (since, apparently, many of those he fought for don't): "The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice." One magazine page at a time.
Photograph of Essence cover.
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The 9th Circuit has ordered a stay that will prevent gay marriages from beginning again in California later this week, as they otherwise would have. Some gay rights groups are professing disappointment, but they should probably be relieved. This order makes the 9th Circuit seem sober and deliberate rather than radical and rash. And that keeps away the Supreme Court. Better to have gay marriage delayed than attract the attention of the conservative justices who sometimes seem like they reverse the 9th Circuit for sport. This way, the 9th Circuit will get its crack to rule before the Supremes touch the case in any way. It helps that the three-judge panel acted unanimously and is made up of two Clinton appointees and a Reagan appointee.
The judges' order says that the first brief is due September 17, and that the 9th Circuit will hear oral argument the week of December 6. That is fast, and rather than complaining, the plaintiffs challenging Prop 8 said that they are gratified by the speedy schedule. The judges asked for briefing on the question of whether the Prop 8 proponents have standing to appeal, as well as on the merits. So now we can all obsess about whether the group of proponents that defended Prop 8 at trial may continue to do so on appeal. I've already started to here.
I still think it would just be odd and unsatisfying for this case to go away because of lack of standing. California ends up with gay marrriage based on a technicality, even though 52 percent of voters supported Prop 8? But in their order today, the 9th Circuit judges cited the 1997 Supreme Court case Arizonans for Official English v. Arizona, which was about a state ballot initiative that made English the official state language. In that case, after a state employee sued and the district court found that the official-language law was unconstitutional, the state decided not to appeal—just as the governor and attorney general of California have chosen not to this time. When the case got to the Supreme Court, it was thrown out on other grounds, but Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing for a unanimous court, expressed "grave doubts" that the initiative sponsors actually had standing to appeal. That's not the holding of the case, so the 9th Circuit or eventually the Supreme Court could take a different path here. But you can see why the idea that the Prop 8 proponents don't have standing is tantalizing to gay marriage advocates. Even if it's really not the best resolution. Anyway, all of this and more will be back in September.
ADDENDUM: One more note about Arizonanans for Official English: In that case, in contrast to the Prop 8 trial, the governor of Arizona did defend the statute at issue before the district court. So Ginsburg framed the question of whether another group could appeal in terms of "standing to defend on appeal in the place of an original defendant ." That helps make clear what's particularly strange about throwing out the Prop 8 appeal for lack of standing: This time, the Prop 8 proponents are the original defendant. Maybe that's how the 9th Circuit or the Supreme Court will see their way to giving the Prop 8 backers standing, despite the rulings that conservative judges have handed down that would point toward dismissal. (Here's a good summary from Erwin Chemerinsky.) But Ginsburg also said that standing "demands that the litigant possess 'a direct stake in the outcome.'" In the past, in many other contexts, the court has been strict about what "direct stake" means. It's not hypothetical and it's not just that you don't like a law. You have to have a concrete injury to have standing. What's the concrete harm to Prop 8 proponents from gay marriage? That's of course a central question not just for getting into court by having standing, but for ruling on the merits of an appeal.
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I got a jolt of schadenfreude this morning from John Schwartz's story in the NYT about Dr. George A. Rekers, a clinical psychologist who has given expert testimony in same-sex marriage and gay adoption cases about how "gay men and lesbians lead parlous lives and raise troubled children," Schwartz writes. Rekers is now scandal-ridden because he took a 10-day trip to Europe with a male prostitute he met through rentboy.com. Rekers says he didn't know about the prostitution stuff until after the trip began. Also, “I have not engaged in any homosexual behavior whatsoever. I am not gay and never have been.” Uh huh, but the cases in which he's been the main expert look shaky.
Even better is the news from Attorney General Bill McCollum of Florida (one of the AGs suing over Obama Care) that he relied on Rekers in defending a Florida ban on gay adoption because he couldn't hardly find a single other academic willing to do so that. “There were only two willing to step forward and testify, and we searched a long time,” he told reporters. Right, because the research just doesn't support the premise that gay people are bad parents. Let's call McCollum's admission scientific progress.
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Rep. Jared Polis came to Washington with Barack Obama and without California's Proposition 8, in the fall of 2008. Now, the freshman representative from Colorado is navigating his first full year as a legislator—and his first year as an openly gay member of Congress. CNN, which is tracking the freshman years of various newly elected officials, has focused on Polis and his partner, Marlon Reis. Here's Polis' thoughtful introduction to the latest installment, on being gay in buttoned-up Capitol:
My partner, Marlon Reis, and I have been together for more than six years. We never saw ourselves or our relationship as anything different from those of other members of Congress, and while notable, the gender of my spouse has little to do with the overall experience of the congressional life and our "freshman year."
The life of a congressional spouse is harder than the life of the member. They do all the work and get none of the recognition. Fortunately, Marlon's passion for writing fiction is consistent with the necessary mobility of the congressional lifestyle and being able to work out of two homes. I am proud that Marlon has chosen to tell his tale.
Reis' tale is even better, wisely riffing on the "otherness" of his age, gender, and sexual orientation at spousal meetings usually reserved for dainty ladies in brooches:
At the time of my introduction, I was something of a novelty among the spouses. At 28 years old, I was one of the youngest spouses in the U.S. Congress. Jared is the second-youngest congressman. Almost immediately, I was mistaken for a staff aide; then again, for a son designated to attend in place of a spouse. More times than I care to remember, I was told, "But you're so young!"
Rarely has anyone seen me for what I actually am. I don my "Congressional Spouse" lapel pin proudly and hope each time not to be questioned, yet I still receive sideways glances and orders to produce an official ID. It is as if my story is too unbelievable to be true, that I am an interloper, someone in a place I do not belong.
It's certainly worth reading the whole story.
Now, I suppose we won't have true post-gender parity among elected officials until a scandal-spinning press conference features a gay man or woman standing stoically behind his or her spouse as they bite their lip and confess to some sordid infidelity. But this has got to be the opening shot in what will prove to be a long, fruitful history of same-sex spouses navigating the strictly gendered, heteronormative world of politics. And of course, I can't wish that cable-news fate upon this fascinating, pioneering power couple.
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Rep. Jared Polis came to Washington with Barack Obama and without California's Proposition 8, in the fall of 2008. Now, the freshman representative from Colorado is navigating his first full year as a legislator—and his first year as an openly gay member of Congress. CNN, which is tracking the freshman years of various newly elected officials, has focused on Polis and his partner, Marlon Reis. Here's Polis' thoughtful introduction to the latest installment, on being gay in buttoned-up Capitol:
My partner, Marlon Reis, and I have been together for more than six years. We never saw ourselves or our relationship as anything different from those of other members of Congress, and while notable, the gender of my spouse has little to do with the overall experience of the congressional life and our "freshman year."
The life of a congressional spouse is harder than the life of the member. They do all the work and get none of the recognition. Fortunately, Marlon's passion for writing fiction is consistent with the necessary mobility of the congressional lifestyle and being able to work out of two homes. I am proud that Marlon has chosen to tell his tale.
Reis' tale is even better, wisely riffing on the "otherness" of his age, gender, and sexual orientation at spousal meetings usually reserved for dainty ladies in brooches:
At the time of my introduction, I was something of a novelty among the spouses. At 28 years old, I was one of the youngest spouses in the U.S. Congress. Jared is the second-youngest congressman. Almost immediately, I was mistaken for a staff aide; then again, for a son designated to attend in place of a spouse. More times than I care to remember, I was told, "But you're so young!"
Rarely has anyone seen me for what I actually am. I don my "Congressional Spouse" lapel pin proudly and hope each time not to be questioned, yet I still receive sideways glances and orders to produce an official ID. It is as if my story is too unbelievable to be true, that I am an interloper, someone in a place I do not belong.
It's certainly worth reading the whole story.
Now, I suppose we won't have true post-gender parity among elected officials until a scandal-spinning press conference features a gay man or woman standing stoically behind his or her spouse as they bite their lip and confess to some sordid infidelity. But this has got to be the opening shot in what will prove to be a long, fruitful history of same-sex spouses navigating the strictly gendered, heteronormative world of politics. And of course, I can't wish that cable-news fate upon this fascinating, pioneering power couple.
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The talking point about Obama’s memo on domestic partnerships is that “It’s a first step.” Obama said it, and John Berry, the openly gay head of the Office of Personnel Management, has been repeating it all day. The implication is that the administration is ready to march proudly down the path of ever more gay freedom and equality. This strikes me as only half believable, as Emily pointed out yesterday. All the administration did was scan the existing law and see where they could apply it without violating the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). That counts as barely a step at all. The next “step,” Berry said on the radio today, is the hate crimes law, which, as Andrew Sullivan often points out, is mostly symbolic and makes very little difference in anyone’s life. And as gay rights advocates say, the administration went beyond the call of duty in its brief taking on a challenge to DOMA. They defended the essence of the act, calling heterosexual marriage the “traditionally and universally recognized form” (not true, see California, Iowa, Maine, Vermont, Connecticut) and arguably lumping gay marriage with incest.
My suspicion is that despite his campaign promise, Obama is genuinely conflicted about DOMA. In California, the fight against gay marriage was led by black churches, and Obama must have been exposed to that sentiment over the years. This is why this feels like the first instance of Obama behaving in a disingenuous way. More honest would be to treat gay rights as he treated race and abortion, and give a full throttled speech about strong convictions on all sides, which would surface the contradictions. Instead, he is uncharacteristically mumbling his way through this one, putting forth the chipper gay bureaucrat to do his talking for him.
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With all this talk of Sotomayor, we've neglected the other big story from yesterday: Proposition 8 was upheld in California. Maybe this makes me a cynic, or even close to a conspiracy theorist, but I wonder if Obama deliberately announced her nomination yesterday so that Sotomayor would dominate the news cycle, and he wouldn't be forced to comment on the gay marriage ban.
Obama has been relatively mum about gay marriage recently. According to a New York Times article from earlier this month:
While Mr. Obama has said he is “open to the possibility” that his views on same-sex marriage are misguided, he has offered no signal that he intends to change his position ... Anything substantive he might say on same-sex marriage—after the Iowa ruling, the White House put out a statement saying the president “respects the decision”—would be endlessly parsed. If Mr. Obama were to embrace same-sex marriage, he would be seen as reversing a campaign position and alienating some moderate and religious voters he has courted.
What do you think, ladies? Was the announcement of Sotomayor timed so that Obama could ignore the California conundrum, or was it a coincidence? Tobias Wolff, a law professor and Obama's campaign advisor on gay rights, told the Times about Obama's gay-marriage stance: "I think [Obama] has a genuine sense ... that in order to move these issues forward you need broader buy-in than you are going to get if you poke a stick in too many people's eyes." But is he pulling the wool over those eyes instead?
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A few days late to this one, but author Jennifer Finney Boylan had a great essay in Monday's New York Times about how complex the gay marriage issue becomes one when of the partners is transgender. Because different states have different regulations as to who "counts" as male or female—i.e., whether the determination relies on the gender you were assigned at birth or the gender you self-identify with, and whether or not surgery affects that determination—the landscape can get very muddled very quickly. Boylan quotes a lawyer from a 1999 case concerning a transgendered woman, Christie Lee Littleton, whose biologically male husband had passed away. See if you can manage to follow along:
... Mrs. Littleton, while in San Antonio, Tex., is a male and has a void marriage; as she travels to Houston, Tex., and enters federal property, she is female and a widow; upon traveling to Kentucky she is female and a widow; but, upon entering Ohio, she is once again male and prohibited from marriage; entering Connecticut, she is again female and may marry; if her travel takes her north to Vermont, she is male and may marry a female; if instead she travels south to New Jersey, she may marry a male.
Confusing, right? Even Boylan—an incredibly lucid, intelligent writer—sometimes has a tough time pinning down these complex concepts into simple language. Originally I'd wanted to pull out this paragraph for my blog post, but then for the life of me couldn't understand the last sentence:
Gender involves a lot of gray area. And efforts to legislate a binary truth upon the wide spectrum of gender have proven only how elusive sexual identity can be. The case of J’noel Gardiner, in Kansas, provides a telling example. Ms. Gardiner, a postoperative transsexual woman, married her husband, Marshall Gardiner, in 1998. When he died in 1999, she was denied her half of his $2.5 million estate by the Kansas Supreme Court on the ground that her marriage was invalid. Thus in Kansas, any transgendered person who is anatomically female is now allowed to marry only another woman.
What does "anatomically female" mean here? Someone who was born female, or someone who was born male and has had sex reassignment surgery? After consulting with a friend who works at an LGBT organization on precisely these kinds of language issues, he confirmed that Boylan probably meant the latter. The fixation on surgery and genitalia as some kind of marker for what "makes" a man or a woman is inherently problematic, but it's not likely to go away any time soon—the concept is too culturally hard-wired for most of us to abandon completely. Until then, let's just hope we have more people like Boylan, helping us parse things out, one step at a time.
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A few days late to this one, but author Jennifer Finney Boylan had a great essay in Monday's New York Times about how complex the gay marriage issue becomes one when of the partners is transgender. Because different states have different regulations as to who "counts" as male or female—i.e., whether the determination relies on the gender you were assigned at birth or the gender you self-identify with, and whether or not surgery affects that determination—the landscape can get very muddled very quickly. Boylan quotes a lawyer from a 1999 case concerning a transgendered woman, Christie Lee Littleton, whose biologically male husband had passed away. See if you can manage to follow along:
... Mrs. Littleton, while in San Antonio, Tex., is a male and has a void marriage; as she travels to Houston, Tex., and enters federal property, she is female and a widow; upon traveling to Kentucky she is female and a widow; but, upon entering Ohio, she is once again male and prohibited from marriage; entering Connecticut, she is again female and may marry; if her travel takes her north to Vermont, she is male and may marry a female; if instead she travels south to New Jersey, she may marry a male.
Confusing, right? Even Boylan—an incredibly lucid, intelligent writer—sometimes has a tough time pinning down these complex concepts into simple language. Originally I'd wanted to pull out this paragraph for my blog post, but then for the life of me couldn't understand the last sentence:
Gender involves a lot of gray area. And efforts to legislate a binary truth upon the wide spectrum of gender have proven only how elusive sexual identity can be. The case of J’noel Gardiner, in Kansas, provides a telling example. Ms. Gardiner, a postoperative transsexual woman, married her husband, Marshall Gardiner, in 1998. When he died in 1999, she was denied her half of his $2.5 million estate by the Kansas Supreme Court on the ground that her marriage was invalid. Thus in Kansas, any transgendered person who is anatomically female is now allowed to marry only another woman.
What does "anatomically female" mean here? Someone who was born female, or someone who was born male and has had sex reassignment surgery? After consulting with a friend who works at an LGBT organization on precisely these kinds of language issues, he confirmed that Boylan probably meant the latter. The fixation on surgery and genitalia as some kind of marker for what "makes" a man or a woman is inherently problematic, but it's not likely to go away any time soon—the concept is too culturally hard-wired for most of us to abandon completely. Until then, let's just hope we have more people like Boylan, helping us parse things out, one step at a time.
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I just got a note from GLAD saying that Maine's Governor Balducci has signed into law a bill that gender-neutralizes marriage, initiated and passed by Maine's legislature without any court case or judicial involvement whatsoever. That makes Maine the first equal-marriage state to do so entirely on its elected officials' own initiative.
I'm a lumberjack and I'm okay, indeed. A friend from Maine says the Gov. is very close to his out lesbian sister; she expected the signing to come quickly. It's just hard to tell someone you've known and loved and fought with from birth that you don't think she should have the same rights and responsibilities that you do. Maine has a very active referendum process, so it will go up for a statewide vote soon. Go Mainiacs! Marry early, marry often, and hang on to those licenses!
Goodness, fairness is breaking out all over. I thought June was the marriage month! Perhaps judges and legislators in Iowa, Vermont, and Maine thought it might be nice to give same-sex couples and their families a chance to plan before they set those bells ringing?
Next in queue: New Hampshire, New Jersey, and New York. And I'm told we should expect a California rematch next year. Now that no state has to worry about being vilified for going first (Massachusetts), second (Connecticut), third (Iowa) or even fourth (Vermont), maybe equality seems like a no-brainer?
I don't know when it takes effect.
