Did Texas outlaw marriage?

Heh:

Dan Savage on gay marriage

(Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan)

The persecution of gay marriage opponents

You see this kind of thing a lot on the conservative side of the argument:

I’m 26 years old and my generation holds very strong views on this topic… in my experience, mostly in support of same-sex marriage. Personally, I’m on the fence about it. But for most people my age, that is not good enough. The peer pressure to support gay marriage is enormous. Which is precisely why I refuse to give my (socially mandatory in many circles) full-throated support to it. When friends tell me it’s a civil right and denying gays their “universal right to marriage” is the same as forbidding whites and blacks to marry, it makes my skin crawl . . . but I don’t know how to argue against these points. I just know deep down there’s something fishy about the arguments.

The way defenders of traditional marriage are treated appalls me, but the reason is simple. Gay marriage activists have dehumanized them totally in their own minds, which of course justifies anything. There can be no debate; for so many people I know, the “universal right to marriage” is as settled as the law of gravity, and anyone who disagrees is evil. A big reason why I’m on the fence is because there is only one “legitimate” opinion among my peers and supporting same-sex marriage is meaningless when it’s the only choice and the alternative is to be called a bigot. In the climate I live in, even to say, “Maybe they have a point” is risky and an easy way to lose a friend. I admire the courage of those on your side of the issue who take the stand publicly and accept all the heat that goes with it.

Understand: Opponents of gay marriage — though they’ve won every election where the issue was put to a statewide referendum — really believe they’re the victims in this debate. It doesn’t make any sense, really, unless those opponents feel like they need to claim the victim status in order to hold onto some kind of moral high ground.

But what evidence does the correspondent above present in support of his case that “defenders of traditional marriage” are treated poorly? That they have to face peer pressure? Well, boo hoo. Gay marriage opponents don’t want to just win the policy battle; they’d rather not get their feelings hurt by criticism. Oh, the oppression! This is what is known in politics as “having your cake and eating it, too.”

(On a related note, does anybody believe the correspondent above is “on the fence” regarding this issue? Seems like he/she has already taken sides … and lacks the courage of his/her convictions.)

It’s worth noting that if gay marriage opponents eventually lose this battle — and I believe they will, eventually, in most states — they lose nothing tangible. Nothing about heterosexual marriage will change at all. And despite the alarms, they won’t lose their First Amendment freedoms to think or say that homosexual marriage is bad. And churches will not lose their First Amendment freedoms not to offer religious ceremonies for gay unions.

Right now, though, proponents of gay marriage are losing most of the big battles. And while you can’t lose what you’ve never had, they are in many cases being deprived of more tangible benefits: The joint tax filing, the sharing of child custody, the ability to navigate sickness and end-of-life issues are all off-limits to gay couples — or, at least, much more difficult to come by. Heterosexual couples would never stand for it.

One hesitates to turn public policy into a victimization-off: Everybody loses. But the only thing that gay marriage opponents really stand to lose is the satisfaction of having lots of people agree with them. Gay couples, though, live daily under a legal regime that makes it more difficult to conduct their lives normally. It’s no contest.

Gay marriage loses in Maine

So much for that live and let live New England ethos, eh? How disappointing. And I confess that I increasingly don’t get it.

“Defenders of traditional marriage” treat this debate as zero sum — as though giving gays the right to marry will somehow take away something from heterosexuals. But it won’t. Not that it matters, I suppose. Fear and bigotry get to carry the day, once again. I’m confident that won’t always be the case; today, though, I’m kind of angry.

Hey gay people: Barack Obama doesn’t really care about you

Well, this is kind of a breathtaking reaction from the White House to yesterday’s gay rights march in Washington:

NBC just did a piece about today’s gay rights march in Washington. For the political context of the gay community’s ire, NBC went to Chief Washington Correspondent John Harwood. Harwood was asked if the White House was worried about “the left as a whole,” and concerns they have that the White House isn’t doing things that “the left” expected them to do. Harwood said the following:

Barack Obama is doing well with 90% or more of Democrats so the White House views this opposition as really part of the Internet left fringe.Harwood then went on to say:

For a sign of how seriously the White House does or doesn’t take this opposition, one adviser told me those bloggers need to take off the pajamas, get dressed, and realize that governing a closely divided country is complicated and difficult.So the gay community, and its concerns about President Obama’s inaction, and backtracking, on DADT and DOMA, are now, according to President Obama’s White House, part of a larger “fringe” that acts like small children who play in their pajamas and need to grow up.

I like to think I’m a relatively sophisticated adult: I certainly know that “governing a closely divided country is complicated and difficult.” But I think President Obama has put “gay issues” on the backburner because they’re not that important to him — and he’s not willing to burn political capital on issues that aren’t a priority.

Even if he’s not willing to go to Congress, there are some things he can do in the short-term to make life easier for gays and lesbians. For one thing he can — citing military necessity — stop kicking solidiers out of the military simply for being gay. As Andrew Sullivan says: “If you believe it is wrong to fire people from their jobs solely because they are gay, as you said Saturday night, stop doing it.”

Until the president actually takes substantive action to support the rights of gays and lesbians in America — until he risks something for that cause — I’ve no reason to believe that he cares much about their causes beyond them being an important constituency for the Democratic Party. In the meantime, for the White House to marginalize people who are understandably impatient for change is cynical and disheartening.

UPDATE: From Kevin Drum:

In an email to the Huffington Post on Monday, Harwood clarified that the quote was not meant to convey any displeasure on the part of the administration for the gay community’s public advocacy.

“My comments quoting an Obama adviser about liberal bloggers/pajamas weren’t about the LGBT community or the marchers,” he wrote. “They referred more broadly to those grumbling on the left about an array of issues in addition to gay rights, including the war in Afghanistan and health care and Guantanamo — and whether all that added up to trouble with Obama’s liberal base…”

So let me revise the headline: Hey liberals! Obama doesn’t really care about you!

Obama and gay rights: Still not good enough

From the LA Times:

A 1996 law banning federal recognition of same-sex marriage is discriminatory and should be repealed, lawyers for the Obama administration said in court papers filed Monday, offering moral support for a constitutional challenge brought by a gay couple from Orange County.

But in a demonstration of the president’s inability to quickly deliver on campaign promises to end bias against gays, the Justice Department urged dismissal of the lawsuit challenging the Defense of Marriage Act, noting it remains law until Congress repeals it.

Hey, the president is obligated to defend the country’s laws in court. I get it. And it’s nice that his lawyers found a way to say that they don’t like the law, but it’s still the law.

It’s still not enough, because the Obama Administration has done nothing to change the law.

I know: There’s a health care debate going on right now that’s consuming all the political oxygen out there. Opening a second legislative front on behalf of gay rights might well doom both efforts to failure.

But at some point — soon — Obama’s going to have to do better than say the right things on gay rights. He’s going to have to do something.

Why Philly needs gay marriage

I’ve been surprised, since moving to Philly, that a lot of the pro-gay-marriage activism in this city has been focused almost entirely on California and Proposition 8. Maybe I’m missing stuff – I don’t hob-nob with Philly’s gay activists – but that’s kind of weird to me. Philly’s relatively gay-friendly, from what I can tell, but there aren’t marriage rights here. So why no fuss?

I thought about this again last night, reading a piece in National Journal about a gay couple from Ohio. One of the partners got sick while on a trip to Philly, and it got complicated.

Having just been told, at 3 a.m., that his partner of three decades might die within hours, Mike Brittenback was told something else: Before rushing to Bill’s side, he needed to collect and bring with him documents proving his medical power of attorney. This indignity, unheard-of in the world of heterosexual marriage, is a commonplace of American gay life.

Frantic, Mike tore through the house but could not find the papers. He would need to retrieve them from a safe-deposit box. Which was at a bank. Which did not open until 9 a.m.

Somehow Mike made it through the next six hours, “crying and frantic and all kinds of awful things running through my mind,” fetched the documents, and got on the road. By some higher mercy, those lost hours did not cost Bill his life. When Mike arrived in Philadelphia on Saturday afternoon, Bill was still alive, though in grave danger.

Mike had packed clothes for a week.

And that’s what the fight for marriage is about: Not simply the right to love each other — no law can force or prohibit that — but the right to care for each other.

My relatively open-minded conservative friends say they don’t have a problem with gay couples loving and caring for each other. They just don’t want to give up “marriage” as being exclusively a straight institution. But that’s a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too conflict I can’t reconcile. Sure, some states allow gay couples the legal right to care for each other through civil unions. But a lot of states don’t go that far. And so gay couples are forced to deal with indignities and obstacles that heterosexual couples don’t experience — and would never stand for, frankly.

So Philly needs gay marriage. Pennsylvania needs gay marriage. Loving, committed couples need the right to care for each other. It’s that simple.

Obama to give a nice speech about Stonewall

Daily Beast:

The White House will commemorate the Stonewall riots for the first time on Monday, but is it too little too late? Some gay-rights groups are boycotting the ceremony because, as GLAAD President Jarrett Barrios (who is attending) puts it in Monday’s Washington Post, “as President Obama, he has presided over an administration that has stumbled—sometimes symbolically, sometimes substantially—in its commitment to include us on the agenda.”

Unless the president announces plans to repeal — or at least neuter — Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, I’m not all that interested in what he has to say today. Republicans during the campaign often criticized the president for being all talk, no substance; I’m not really willing to concede the point, because that’s what politicians do. But on gay rights, certainly, the president is going to have to do more than say nice words about events 40 years to earn back my trust. He’s going to have to do something, and he’s even going to have to risk becoming unpopular because of it.

All we are saying is: Give Obama a chance

At Facebook, an old friend objects to my criticisms of President Obama:

With all due respect, people of all stripes are expecting the world from the President; he’s only barely completed the first 3rd of his first year in office-and quite frankly there have been (and are) more pressing matters at hand. But I applaud this action.

And with slightly more irritation (possibly provoked by Brendan’s summation) he later adds:

Yeah, because John McCain would have done so much more for gays, right? Jesus, look at this through the prism of politics – he’s a politician. He’s not going to go whole hog in the first three months of his first administration.

My response?

I think the problem isn’t so much that he hasn’t done everything I’d hoped he’d do — it’s that he’s actually done some things that seem actively harmful to gay rights (again, defense of DOMA, enforcement of DADT,  and Purpose-Driven inaugural) while proclaiming himself a friend of gays. I didn’t expect to go too far forward by this time, but it feels like we’re slipping backward a little.

Would McCain have been better? No.

My friend is right. Obama’s a politician. And I’ve reconciled myself to the idea that there’s a certain amount of lesser-evilness that one has to settle for if one wants one’s political activity to be effective.

But Obama received a lot of political support from people who expected some forward movement on gay rights. The people who really, really hate gays weren’t voting for him, for the most part. That’s part of the political equation, too, and I suspect he’s taking his gay-concerned folks for granted precisely because he’s not John McCain. That’s not good enough.

What’s more, I don’t think it serves the causes we care about very well to view them from the president’s pragmatic perspective. If we care about gay rights — or health care, or civil liberties — we need to hold his feet to the fire and not trust that he’ll get around to it eventually because he’s swell.

If the politically smart or pragmatic thing to do, in his case, is to put off gay rights because opponents will make a huge stink that will make the president uncomfortable … well, then, the smart thing for people who care about gay rights to do is make an even bigger stink to make it even MORE painful for the president to appease our opponents.

I like President Obama. I want him to succeed. But I don’t want him to succeed so much that I’m willing to give him a pass on the issues that matter to me. Otherwise, I might as well have voted for John McCain.

Barack Obama and gay people

Looks like gay Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson will also get to offer a prayer at inaugural ceremonies for Barack Obama (though, it should be pointed out, not at the inauguration itself). This, of course, is Obama’s way of telling gay supporters that he loves them — really! — even though Rick Warren, who helped win passage of Prop 8 in California, will be giving the prayer at the main bash. It’s a nice gesture, I suppose, but given that we’ve been through a couple of weeks of discontent over the Warren selection, this does feel a bit like an afterthought, a bone-throwing to an otherwise pretty reliable Democratic constituency.

More importantly, we now have a commitment from the Obama Administration to end “don’t ask, don’t tell” in the military. And that’s great, a piece of substance — as opposed to symbolism — that will allow gay Americans to take their rightful place as full citizens. Good.

It occurs to me in all of this that Barack Obama has studied the Clinton Administration pretty closely and, as has been much commented-upon, has been determined not to repeat some of its more notorious errors. One of those was this: After a fall spent pounding away at the senior George Bush on the economy, the Clintons swept into office and immediately became enmeshed in a high-profile “gays in the military” debate. And, for all intents and purposes, lost it. Along with missteps in naming an attorney general and botching the health care debate, it soon looked like Bill Clinton A) didn’t really know what he was doing as president, and B) was more interested in gay issues than the concerns of “ordinary Americans.” He looked like a Republican stereotype of Democratic governance, in other words.

So you see Obama working hard already — before his inaugural — to secure passage of an economic stimulus act. He might also work to close Gitmo. These issues — economic and national security — are pretty universal concerns. “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is on the agenda, but it’s not the first thing on the agenda. By playing it cool and first establishing a “working for all Americans” style of governance, Obama may end up in a better position to secure real progress for gays and lesbians. As they say: That’s change I can believe in.