Gay Rights

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Trending toward Marriage Equality?

The Boston Globe ran this AP story this morning which I read in my print copy. (Long may the Globe prosper so I can read it at breakfast.)  According to the AP

In recent weeks, Vermont and Iowa legalized same-sex marriage, while New York, Maine, and New Hampshire have taken steps in that direction. Polls indicated that younger Americans are far are more tolerant on the issue than are older generations. For now at least, the public is much more focused on the troubled economy and two wars than on social issues.

In addition, over the past decade, public acceptance of gay marriage has changed dramatically.

A Quinnipiac University poll released last week indicated that a majority of respondents, by a 55-to-38 percent margin, oppose gay marriage. But it also found that people, by a 57-to-38 percent margin, support civil unions that would provide marriage-like rights for same-sex couples, indicating a shift toward more acceptance.

I think it is relatively easy step from “marriage-like rights” to actual marriage so this looks hopeful.  The article goes on

With congressional elections next year, Republicans, Democrats, and nonpartisan analysts say the changes benefit Democrats, whose bedrock liberals favor gay unions, and disadvantage Republicans, whose conservative base insists that marriage be solely between a man and a woman.

“This is not a sea change. This is a tide that is slowly rising in favor of gay marriage,” creating a favorable political situation for Democrats and ever-more difficulty for Republicans, said David McCuan, a political scientist at Sonoma State University in California.

Democrats have a broader base filled with more accepting younger voters, as well as flexibility on the issue. Hard-core liberals support gay marriage, while others, including President Obama, take a more moderate position of civil unions and defer to states on gay marriage.

Conversely, the GOP base is older, smaller, and more conservative. Republicans have no place to shift on the issue but to the left, because the party has been identified largely with its rock-solid opposition to gay marriage and civil unions. Also, the GOP has no titular head setting the tone on this or other issues.

And tell me please, how is this couple in Iowa different from any other couple anywhere?

Veronica Spann (left) and Kentaindra Scarver were emotional as their marriage waiver was approved in Iowa on April 27.

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Vermont Makes Four: Another state votes for marriage equality

What a last few days!  First Iowa and then Vermont.  The important thing about Vermont is that this happened, not through the courts, but through legislation.  Shap Smith, Speaker of the Vermont House, is quoted in Newsweek as saying, ” People here have seen what it looks like and realized it doesn’t harm anybody.”

John Nichols  reported in the Nation

While progress in Iowa came via the judicial route, and is likely to spark ongoing political struggles, the victory in Vermont was a political one that comes at the culmination of a long struggle in a state that nine years ago was the first in the nation to authorize civil unions for same-sex couples.

The final stage of that struggle came on Tuesday, after Republican Governor Jim Douglas had vetoed legislation allowing gays and lesbians to marry.

To override the veto, supporters of the legislation needed to muster two-thirds of the vote in the state House and Senate.

They did that with relative ease.

The vote in the House was 100 to 49 in favor of overriding the veto and enacting what was dubbed “An Act to Protect Religious Freedom and Promote Equality in Civil Marriage.”

The vote in the Senate was an even more lopsided 23-5.

Democrats, who control both chambers, Republicans, independents and members of the state’s Progressive Party — members of which have long championed marriage rights — all voted for the override.

NPR has a great interactive map showing the progress of marriage equality.

As Bob Dylan once wrote, “the times they are a-changin'”.

 

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Iowa Joins the Marriage Equality States

With today’s unanimous decision, the Iowa Supreme Court made Iowa the third state to approve of same sex marriage joining Massachusetts and Connecticut.  According to the story in the Washington Post

The decision will be considered final in 21 days unless a rehearing is formally requested. The county that challenged the lower court’s ruling indicated today that it would not file such a request, meaning that same-sex couples likely will be able to obtain marriage licenses in Iowa in three weeks, attorneys for the plaintiffs said.

So what do the defense of marriage folks do now?  Richard Kim has a long post on The Nation.com in which he outlines the options and discusses some of the larger political implications. 

So now that the Iowa Supreme Court has essentially legalized gay marriage, what’s next? Some right-wingers (like Iowa Congressman Steve King and William Duncan of the Marriage Law Foundation) are already promising to put a defense of marriage amendment in front of Iowa voters. But they have a long road ahead of them. Iowa law says that a constitutional ammendment must pass TWO consecutive sessions of the state legislature before it appears on a ballot. So the earliest one could see a DOMA on the ballot is 2011, but with Democrats in control of both houses and with both the House speaker and the Senate majority leader on record supporting the decision–there’s virtually no chance that such an amendment would even come up for a vote this session.

That leaves the right-wing with a daunting task: defeat enough Democrats to take control of both houses (Dems currently enjoy a 56-44 and 32-18 advantage), replace them with Christian right Republicans who are willing to champion a marriage amendement and peel off enough remaining Democrats (to offset any moderate GOP defectors) to squeeze through four rounds of yes votes. Only then will they even have the chance to put the issue in front of voters–sometime in 2013 or 2014 if all the stars align. Then, they still have to win that campaign in a political climate in which increasing numbers of voters support gay rights. Oh yeah, and the vote will take place after Iowans have witnessed 5-6 years of ho-hum same-sex nuptials of which the most radical, earth-shaking element is that one of the grooms is a 50-year old church organist named Otter Dreaming (one of the named appellees in the Iowa decision). As Ari Berman points out, Iowa isn’t exactly the hotbed of culture war antagonism–despite being square one for GOP presidential wrangling–so my strong hunch is that Mr. Dreaming’s marriage will endure at least any legal and political challenges.

It doesn’t seem very likely that Iowa will amend it’s Constitution.  Here in Massachusetts it didn’t take long for gay marriage to just become marriage.  Just read Andrew Sullivans story about his Massachusetts wedding.

Born in a different era, I reached that conclusion through more pain and fear and self-loathing than my 20-something fellow homosexuals do today. But it was always clear to me nonetheless. It just never fully came home to me until I too got married.

It happened first when we told our families and friends of our intentions. Suddenly, they had a vocabulary to describe and understand our relationship. I was no longer my partner’s “friend” or “boyfriend”; I was his fiancé. Suddenly, everyone involved themselves in our love. They asked how I had proposed; they inquired when the wedding would be; my straight friends made jokes about marriage that simply included me as one of them. At that first post-engagement Christmas with my in-laws, I felt something shift. They had always been welcoming and supportive. But now I was family. I felt an end—a sudden, fateful end—to an emotional displacement I had experienced since childhood.

The wedding occurred last August in Massachusetts in front of a small group of family and close friends. And in that group, I suddenly realized, it was the heterosexuals who knew what to do, who guided the gay couple and our friends into the rituals and rites of family. Ours was not, we realized, a different institution, after all, and we were not different kinds of people. In the doing of it, it was the same as my sister’s wedding and we were the same as my sister and brother-in-law. The strange, bewildering emotions of the moment, the cake and reception, the distracted children and weeping mothers, the morning’s butterflies and the night’s drunkenness: this was not a gay marriage; it was a marriage.

And our families instantly and for the first time since our early childhood became not just institutions in which we were included, but institutions that we too owned and perpetuated. My sister spoke of her marriage as if it were interchangeable with my own, and my niece and nephew had no qualms in referring to my husband as their new uncle. The embossed invitations and the floral bouquets and the fear of fluffing our vows: in these tiny, bonding gestures of integration, we all came to see an alienating distinction become a unifying difference.

It was a moment that shifted a sense of our own identity within our psyches and even our souls. Once this happens, the law eventually follows. In California this spring, it did.

So I think Richard Kim is right.  Iowans are soon going to find gay marriages just as ordinary as straight ones.  So what is left for the opposition?  Here’s Richard Kim again

So, here’s my guess as to what the right can and will do. They’ll move to amend Iowa’s marriage law so that it requires in-state residency. Currently, Iowa (like California and unlike Massachusetts) does not have any such restriction (prompting claims that Iowa will become the Mecca of gay marriage). Of course, because of the court’s equal protection ruling, any such change will have to apply to both gay and straight couples, but the collateral benefit for the right would be in limiting the number of gay couples who can marry in Iowa and then sue in other states. But after thousands of out-of-state couples got married in CA and will likely stay married no matter how the CA Supreme Court rules on Prop 8’s broader legality–there’s not much use in raising this hurdle.

So, Iowa, Massachusetts welcomes you to the club.  I don’t think it will be too long before there are more than three members.

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Ending the Defense of Marriage Act

A lawsuit was filed last week here in Massachusetts alleging that the 1996 Federal Defense of Marriage Act  is unconstitutional and discriminatory. 

According to the story in the Boston Globe on March 3

The suit, which legal specialists described as the first serious challenge to the federal law signed by President Bill Clinton, contends that the statute has deprived the plaintiffs of benefits enjoyed by heterosexual married couples.

Those benefits include health insurance for spouses of federal employees, tax deductions for couples who jointly file federal income tax returns, and the ability to use a spouse’s last name on a passport.

I think it is about time someone litigated the issue.  I have friends who end up going though lots of gyrations this time of year filing individual federal returns and joint state ones.  I know people who can’t get health insurance throught their federally employed spouse.  And I think it is criminal that people like Massachusetts Congressman Studds surviving spouse can’t get his death benefits.

Those who oppose same sex marriage worry that the end of the Defense of Marriage Act would mean that the individual states would have to approve of gay marriage.  Mary Bonauto, the attorney from GLAD who brought the lawsuit responds

If the plaintiffs win, she said, it would not extend same-sex marriage beyond Massachusetts and Connecticut, the two states where it is legal.

But it would dismantle a federal statute that affects more than 1,000 marriage-related benefits, and it would be a huge victory on symbolic and practical levels for supporters of same-sex marriage, according to legal specialists.

The plaintiffs and GLAD have a long road ahead of them and I, for one, wish them well and I’m proud that Massachusetts citizens are, once again, leading the way to equality.

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Pastor Rick Updated

After I did my post on the invocation, I ran across this blog entry by Melissa Etheridge.  She recounts her conversation with Rick Warren and how she now feels about having him do the invocation.

As Bob and I were saying at breakfast this morning, maybe Barack Obama is up to something here – like co-opting the religious right.  Our conversation was triggered by this little note on the Boston Globe editorial page:

Evangelicals: Too outspoken a spokesman
Richard Cizik was forced to resign earlier this month after 28 years as vice president for public affairs with the National Association of Evangelicals, despite expanding the flock among younger evangelicals with his calls for “creation care” on the environment. The last straw for the church hierarchy was Cizik’s Dec. 2 interview with NPR’s Terry Gross of “Fresh Air,” in which he revealed he voted for Barack Obama in the Virgina primary and said he was growing more tolerant of civil unions (though not marriage equality) for gay couples. The worst part is that Cizik’s departure will give cheer to rival Christian activists such as James Dobson, who wanted Cizik fired for his “relentless” campaign against global warming long before gay marriage was a big issue.

As they used to say on Laugh-In,  “Very Interesting.”

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More Thoughts on Prop 8

In her The Last Word Column  in the November 24 issue of Newsweek Ann Quindlen wrote about gay marriage and the decision in Loving v. Virginia.

One of my favorite Supreme Court cases is Loving v. Virginia, and not just because it has a name that would delight any novelist. It’s because it reminds me, when I’m downhearted, of the truth of the sentiment at the end of “Angels in America,” Tony Kushner’s brilliant play: “The world only spins forward.”

I also wrote about Loving in my post Marriage in Massachusetts.  It is also one of my favorite decisions as well as a wonderful story.

The world is going to continue to spin forward.  The denial of Constitutional rights to a specific group can never last.  There may be one step forward (see Connecticut and New Jersey) and two back (California and other other states which have adopted anti-gay marriage statutes recently), but we will keep moving forward.

And then there is this great Jack Black video.  It has been out there for a while, but it is always worth seeing.

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Marriage in Massachusetts

I was married in Virginia in 1994, but when we first met in 1965 it is likely that it would have been illegal for us to marry there as it was pre-Loving vs. Virginia.  That case was the vehicle for the Supreme Court to say in 1967 that bans on interracial marriage are unconstitutional.    While ours is an Asian – Caucasian marriage and not a Black-White one, things were definitely different in 1965 and it took a long time to change.  But they did change and now Virginia can elect a Senator who is part of an interracial marriage.  There are even Republicans like Clarence Thomas who engage is what used to called miscegenation.

So what does this have to do with marriage in Massachusetts you might ask?  Massachusetts has just repealed a 1913 law passed in support of the the bans on interracial marriage.  The repeal came because supporters of gay marriage (like me) wanted to allow couples from other states to marry.  I think that the repeal of the 1913 law will be like the Loving decision, opening the door to change in other states.  The homophobes can dis Massachusetts and California all they want, but the tide is changing.