Get this- it seems like the Right wing is going for the Constitutional Amendment that says marriage is strictly between a man and a woman!
Fucking unbelievable.
From the Washington Post-
Same-sex unions move center stage
Gay marriage enters the American consciousness
By David Von Drehle
THE WASHINGTON POST
Nov. 23 — Such a nice-looking couple, an Air Force veteran and a librarian, both in their late twenties. After more than three years of steady romance, they decided to get hitched. So they went to the county clerk’s office in Minneapolis. It was May 18, 1970.
JACK BAKER and Michael McConnell were denied the license they sought because neither one was a woman. Baker, a law student on the G.I. Bill, took the matter to court. He lost, appealed and lost again.
McConnell lost his job because of the publicity; Baker was elected student body president at the University of Minnesota. Mostly, the incident was treated as a curiosity. Look magazine profiled the couple: “Neither is a limp-wristed sissy,” the writer assured readers. Leading gay rights activists dismissed the pair.
But what started that day in 1970 has moved, in a single generation, from the fringe to the center of the American consciousness. Last week, a divided Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court announced a right to same-sex civil marriage under that state’s constitution. It was a step further than any other court had gone, but only a step — courts in other states have been moving along the same path for a decade.
Vermont recognizes a marriage equivalent called “civil unions” for same-sex couples. Courts in Hawaii and Alaska were headed toward same-sex unions until voters cut them off with state constitutional amendments. Justice Antonin Scalia of the U.S. Supreme Court believes that the nation’s highest tribunal is going the same way, and that laws defining marriage to exclude same-sex couples stand on very shaky legal ground.
Outlandish in 1970, constitutionally fundamental in Massachusetts today. The advance of this idea is even more remarkable because it was largely unplanned and unsanctioned. For years, leading gay rights organizations gave the effort little or no support, and even today, many gay men and lesbians have grave misgivings about the push for marriage rights. Some fear a backlash that could strengthen their opponents; others question whether it is worth the struggle to enter a battered institution. Neither political party has lifted a finger to further the cause.
But for many reasons, some obvious, some arcane, the idea has gained unforeseen momentum in U.S. courtrooms. No supreme court, state or federal, has ruled against it in more than 10 years, and now opponents of same-sex marriage feel they must try the most arduous political route of all — an amendment to the U.S. Constitution — to stop it.
Understanding how this happened casts light on the gay rights movement, on the political process and on the idea of same-sex marriage itself. And it illustrates a sometimes forgotten fact of democracy: Things can happen without planning, without the approval of leaders, with little coordination, preparation or fanfare, simply because determined people really, deeply want them to.
THE ‘GAY AGENDA’ ARGUMENT
Critics of same-sex marriage have long portrayed it as part of a “gay agenda,” pursued through a “stealth strategy of using the courts to force gay marriage on a country that rejects the idea,” as traditional values activist Gary Bauer put it in an interview last week.
For more than 25 years, the marriage issue remained a low priority — even a source of aggravation — for much of the established gay leadership.
That is not how the leaders of the fledgling gay movement of Minneapolis saw things when Jack Baker filed his lawsuit, however. This was at the dawn of gay politics. The galvanizing Stonewall riot in New York, in which patrons of a gay bar violently resisted a police raid, had happened just a year earlier, in 1969. To the extent that gays had any clear political program, it was to win the freedom to be themselves without fear of violence, arrest or job loss.
Allan Spear, a history professor at the University of Minnesota who would soon become one of the first openly gay legislators in the United States, warned that Baker and McConnell could “sabotage” gay rights by outraging the public. “Only the lunatic fringe” had any interest in marriage, Spear said. According to Minneapolis writer and gay activist Tim Campbell, Spear’s view was shared by Steve Endean, another community leader. Few people had more influence on the early political agenda of gay organizations than Endean, founder of the largest gay advocacy group in the country, the Human Rights Campaign.
For more than 25 years, the marriage issue remained a low priority — even a source of aggravation — for much of the established gay leadership. Writer Andrew Sullivan, an influential proponent of the right to marry, recalls seeing Human Rights Campaign Executive Director Elizabeth Birch at congressional hearings on the subject in 1996.
“She was mortified,” Sullivan said in a recent interview. “She called the hearings, ‘Hell Week.’ I said, ‘No, it isn’t. This is our chance to put this in the middle of the public debate.’ ”
At the time, Birch was reaching a turning point in her own thinking, she recalled last week. “We were afraid that pushing too hard on this issue would inspire extreme legislation,” she said. “But by 1996 it was clear that we had achieved nothing at the federal level — not even a simple employment nondiscrimination law or hate-crimes bill. The incrementalist approach, while a valid idea, had no effect. So why not be clear about what we need and what we should be given as a matter of birthright and a matter of being fully participating citizens? Set out all the goals at once.”
‘DEATH AND BIRTH’
What had happened to move the marriage issue from Spear’s “lunatic fringe” to congressional hearings? “Lawsuits,” Sullivan said. But even before that, two important facts of gay life in the 1980s and early 1990s reshaped the political priorities of many gay Americans.
‘HIV deepened our sense of how truly we are second-class citizens.’
— EVAN WOLFSON
Gay rights attorney
AIDS was one. The killer disease had a catalytic effect on the movement, as hundreds of thousands of people came to see gay rights not just as a question of personal freedom or self-expression, but in terms of life and death. Even young homosexuals were forced to confront grim practicalities of illness — health insurance, hospital visitation, disability benefits, funeral planning and settling estates. Matters that were fairly streamlined for married couples proved difficult, if not impossible, for same-sex couples, who found themselves barred from their partners’ hospital rooms, unable to make medical decisions, forbidden to cover loved ones on their employee insurance plans.
“HIV deepened our sense of how truly we are second-class citizens,” said Evan Wolfson, a leading gay rights attorney and founder of Freedom to Marry. “And many non-gay Americans began to see gay people not just as individuals, but as people in relationships who love and care for one another and have needs and hurt.”
At the same time, in other hospital rooms, thousands of lesbians were giving birth. It was a seismic moment in the history of mating, when eternal limitations on fertility and conception were being smashed by science and microtechnology. Babies were being conceived in petri dishes, surrogates were gestating embryos for infertile women, young women were donating eggs to be carried by older mothers. On and on. The idea that procreation was the province of one man mating with one woman was refuted by squalling newborns in nurseries from coast to coast.
“Death and birth,” Sullivan mused. “Suddenly, you couldn’t get into the intensive care room where your partner of 20 years was dying. There’s nothing like that experience to make you realize how vulnerable you are. And then the baby boom, especially among lesbians, made them realize they didn’t have any legal protections for their families.”
Gay people began circulating lists of all the laws, rights, protections and benefits that are triggered by marriage — a list that now runs past 1,000.
‘MARRIAGE EQUALITY’
Evan Wolfson is a key proponent of “marriage equality,” as he calls it. He was a Peace Corps volunteer in Togo in the early 1980s when he came out as a gay man. Even in his little village, he met people he believed were gay, but in Togo there was no discussion of homosexuality and certainly no tolerance of it, so they had to live what Wolfson considered to be less-than-fulfilled lives. “I realized that the way society frames the discussion actually shapes who you are,” he said.
In 1993, the Hawaii Supreme Court concluded that state marriage laws discriminated against same-sex couples.
Back home, he read an enormously influential and controversial 1981 book by the Yale historian John Boswell, “Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality,” which argued that Christian condemnation of homosexuality was a creation of the medieval church. “That book changed my life,” Wolfson said, because it convinced him that discrimination against gay people was “not part of the natural order.” It could change.
At Harvard Law School, these two related concepts came together for Wolfson in a study of marriage law. Here, he concluded, was a clear case of American society limiting the lives of gay people by framing the law in a certain way. Earlier generations had used marriage laws to restrict other groups — at various times whites could not marry blacks, married women could not enter contracts or own property, couples could not get divorced and so on. Those laws had changed. And so, he figured, could the restriction on same-sex couples.
Initially, he ran into resistance from gay leaders. After becoming a full-time attorney at Lambda Legal, the principal gay-rights law firm in the United States, Wolfson urged his organization to take on a marriage rights lawsuit in Hawaii. He was turned down. So he offered behind-the-scenes help to a Hawaii attorney named Dan Foley — and Foley won the case. In 1993, the Hawaii Supreme Court concluded that state marriage laws discriminated against same-sex couples.
According to Birch and others, gay rights groups were caught flat-footed by the ruling, and by the storm of outraged reaction. “Very little had been done to try to alter the thinking of the public and opinion leaders,” she said. “Normally, that is a process that takes years.” Hawaii voters passed a constitutional amendment to undo the ruling before gay groups could gear up to change their minds.
FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS
The arguments made in the Hawaii case were not much different from the arguments offered by Jack Baker two decades earlier — or from the arguments made this year in Massachusetts. While each case was nuanced by state laws and legal traditions, all drew on two strands of U.S. Supreme Court doctrine.
First, the court has defined a fundamental right of Americans to form families by marriage. In overturning a Nebraska law that forbade the teaching of foreign languages before ninth grade, the court wrote in 1923 that constitutional liberty “without doubt...denotes not merely freedom from bodily restraint but also...to marry, establish a home and bring up children, to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience.”
In 1967, this right to marry was extended to interracial couples. “Under our Constitution,” the court declared, “the freedom to marry, or not marry...resides with the individual.”
The second strand, closely related, defined a “right to privacy” in matters of sex. In 1965, the court struck down a Connecticut law banning contraceptive devices for married couples. As this principle was extended to cover unmarried couples, and then to allow abortion, it had the double effect of pushing the government out of American bedrooms and of erasing the legal connection between sexuality and procreation.
If a person’s sex life is her own business, and if marriage is a fundamental human right, then why not same-sex marriage?
First in Hawaii, then in Alaska and Vermont, courts found that argument persuasive.
‘DEFENSE OF MARRIAGE’ LAWS
Since the Hawaii court ruled 10 years ago, the federal government and 37 states have passed “defense of marriage” laws, eager to ensure that same-sex unions in one state need not be recognized beyond that state. But even conservative constitutional law scholars, led by Scalia, believe that a third, very recent pair of Supreme Court rulings place those laws in jeopardy.
These cases have seriously eroded the power of governments to penalize homosexual behavior. The first, in 1996, struck down a state constitutional referendum in Colorado that would have prevented local governments from passing laws to protect gays against discrimination. The court condemned this “broad and undifferentiated” targeting of “a single named group.” And earlier this year, the justices overturned a 1986 decision that allowed states to criminalize homosexual acts. Lawrence v. Texas declared that traditional values and mores are no justification for infringing the privacy of same-sex couples.
In Massachusetts last week, on a 4 to 3 vote, the state’s high court repeatedly cited these converging lines of constitutional law — the right to marriage, the right to privacy and the liberty of gays — to support its decision to redefine marriage. Furthermore, the court ruled, the idea that marriage is designed to support procreation by men and women is no longer credible, given the number of heterosexual couples without children and the number of gay couples with them.
The court was weighing the case of seven same-sex couples who, like Baker and McConnell a generation before, had sought marriage licenses and been denied. They were represented by Mary Lisa Bonauto of Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders — the same attorney who filed the successful lawsuit in Vermont.
Greg Coleman, a former clerk for conservative Justice Clarence Thomas who now specializes in Supreme Court litigation, recently predicted to a Senate subcommittee that the legal trends that influenced the Massachusetts court make it “likely” that “prohibitions on same-sex marriage...will be held to be unconstitutional [nationwide] in the relatively near future.” That is why a range of traditionalist organizations and some congressional leaders are demanding action on a constitutional amendment to prevent it.
A SIMILARITY
Gary Bauer believes that the courts have finally gone too far, and that a tide of public opinion will block further movement toward same-sex marriage. “I think it’s been hard for people to see what’s going on,” he said last week. “There was a little development in one part of the country, then another somewhere else.” After Massachusetts, “it’s at a point where it is pretty easy to explain what’s going on.”
Evan Wolfson, his polar opposite on this issue, said something similar about the sudden dawning of this issue on the nation. “Ten years ago, nobody was even asked to put the words ‘gay’ and ‘marriage’ in the same sentence. Most Americans never had a chance to hear how this hurts families, or how much gay lives are like other lives. We are having an important discussion here, and rather than closing it down we should be talking about it as citizens.”
Wolfson’s Freedom to Marry project has a sizable grant from heirs of Levi Strauss, the jeans magnate, to sell the idea of “marriage equality” to the public. One of the points he hopes to make is that no church will be forced to bless these unions. Another goal is to soothe the jangled nerves of people who think this is happening too fast.
“This is not about a chess game and some secret strategy,” he said. “This is about real people who want to take on the responsibility of family and marriage. Americans will see that this doesn’t hurt anybody. They will be ready to accept it.”
Ready or not, the battle is joined.
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
