Florida, Arizona and California voted to define marriage as between a man and a woman in their constitutions, making same-sex marriage virtually impossible to gain. In Arkansas, they banned fostering or adopting children “outside of a valid marriage.” This was imposed to prevent same-sex couples from adopting or fostering children, though it now affects cohabiting heterosexual couples, single people and anyone else who isn’t married.<\/p>\n
In California, the decision was joined with a win for animal rights activists<\/a>, whose proposition to eliminate battery cages (confining farm animals to a space smaller than two-feet squared) reigned victorious. This means that thousands of California citizens checked “yes” for animal rights and “yes” for revoking human rights.<\/p>\n This topic is a difficult one for me, both because I’m gay and because I devoted a year of my life towards a thesis against the institution of marriage: to condense 100 pages into a couple of sentences, I’ve researched marriage as a culture that extols one group, privileging its behaviors and mores over less traditional, but no less loving, partnerships and families. And within the institution itself comes a set of rules, based on a history of patriarchal order, that divides us into masculine and feminine expectations for work outside the home, household labor, child rearing and, yes, sex.<\/p>\n I think it’s time to move past marriage, to develop a form of partnership that’s inclusive of all the formations that relationships take. We should accept not just same-sex and opposite-sex monogamous partnerships, but those of caregivers and the disabled, of cohabiting friends and siblings, of people who are committed to more than one partner. These relationships exist, they don’t fit and are denigrated by the exclusive definition of marriage and they deserve equal recognition under the law.<\/p>\n So I’m not the biggest flag waver for marriage. But over the last year, as my graduate student days fall behind me, I’ve thought the issue over more. I met with one of my lecturers, and an amazing civil rights activist and barrister, Judy Walsh. She explained to me that, while she doesn’t believe in marriage either, she believes it should be our choice not to get married. The question of abolishing marriage may come one day, but until then we should enforce equal rights under the law. And marriage excludes same-sex couples and their children.<\/p>\n This seems so obvious to me as I write it, so obvious after meeting my mom’s gay friends from college that have lived together for a quarter century, whose relationship dynamics are like a mirror image of my parents’ (who are straight). I think about myself, about smaller things like Eric dreaming I was Earth Mother, and I wonder if the religious zealots are right, if I would damage my children by raising them in a same-sex household. All of their arguments, about how we’ll ruin the institution, destroy gender roles, raise gay kids or hurt them in some way, how we’ll institute a new gay order — I think about it daily and wonder if we have that power.<\/p>\n I try to tell myself that this is all a fear-based response, these state constitutional bans, that this is the same xenophobia that Obama’s candidacy evoked. Those terrifying Sarah Palin rallies where the audience screamed that Obama was a terrorist, a Muslim, a Socialist and to kill him, they overflowed. A river of hatred of Other, of fear to protect themselves from the unknown rushed these people to the polls. And if they didn’t get through with a president, they made themselves abundantly clear what they think of me, my friends and the GLBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender) community: do what you want, but don’t touch my stuff.<\/em><\/p>\n In Obama’s acceptance speech Tuesday night, he took us from slavery to Montgomery, Alabama; from the right to vote to reproductive rights; and he brought us to today, to this historical moment: our first black president, the 44th President of the United States. This was the first time that someone mentioned gay and straight <\/em>inclusively in a presidential speech. Hearing that was like having a blindfold taken off.<\/p>\n He is, at least in theory, quietly against same-sex marriage (but not a supporter of a Constitutional ban). This is politically understandable enough in the dark ages we inhabit, when you have to be careful not alienate large swaths of the population. It is a fairly common middle of the road that most countries take But he has the guts to say gay and straight<\/em> out loud, counting us as human, as Americans. We have come a very long way since June 28, 1969, when it was illegal for two men to dance together in a club in NYC, when police round-ups were a regular occurrence for my community, the Stonewall Riots happened. We barricaded the door, we threw rocks at police, we marched in the streets for gay liberation. And that was the beginning.<\/p>\n Sometimes, our <\/em>tolerance gets tested. After eight years of Bush, the US rose up and said fuck no. I won’t take another second of this.<\/em> Thirty-nine years ago, the GLBT community said we won’t be arrested anymore. We have the right to be here.<\/em> Five years ago, in Lawrence vs. Texas<\/em>, the Supreme Court legalized gay sex between consenting adults. (Ireland had us beat by a decade, by the way, and they don’t even have abortion rights there.) Maybe we’re not ready yet, maybe we have to wait in line for 140 years like we had to for a black president after slavery.<\/p>\n I don’t think so, though. I don’t think we’re going to wait that long. Soothing apathy may have spread around the Northeast with civil rights advances for Massachusetts, Vermont, Connecticut, New Jersey and New York, but our wins in the West, the Southwest and South won’t give way as easily. In a country this large, we can’t expect this civil rights battle to be cohesive. It’s going to have massive gains and, as we’re feeling today, core shaking losses. But we’ll push back, and we’ll push on because it’s about fairness and equality. We have rights, and we will gain them.<\/p>\n For Planet Waves, this is<\/p>\n Rachel Asher<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dear Friend and Reader, YESTERDAY, AS THE election results rolled in, Eric wrote that we have a long struggle ahead, a massive clean-up job after close to a decade of President Bush. He’s right, and as hundreds of electoral votes built up momentum in a sweeping and early victory for Senator Barack Obama, votes were … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[111],"tags":[524,36,523,52,522,117,520,348,521],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5627"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5627"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5627\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Lisa](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/11\/prop-8-family-2.jpg?resize=333%2C210&ssl=1\" "\\"prop-8-family-2\\"")
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