Opinions
 

Posted at 10:59 AM ET, 05/10/2012
No celebration for this lesbian
By Lauren Taylor







I’m a progressive, out lesbian, but I’m not doing a happy dance aboutPresident Obama’s support for gay marriage.

Here’s the thing: I don’t think we (the country, the society) should be giving rights, privileges and protections to anyone — gay, straight, bisexual or other — based on their sexual or romantic relationships. I think most of the rights and privileges gay men and lesbians are seeking by pursuing marriage rights should be granted to human beings because they are human beings, whether or not they find one person they want to spend the rest of their lives with.

A few examples:

● Everyone should be able to designate who they want to be able to visit them in the hospital. Everyone should be able to take leave to care for a sick loved one.

● Everyone should have access to health insurance. If you’re self-employed, unemployed or work for a place that doesn’t provide health insurance, you shouldn’t need to have a romantic partner who has a job that provides health benefits to get coverage.

● If a couple with a child splits, married or not, all parents should be eligible for visitation and responsible for child support.

● Everyone who pays into Social Security should be able to list who is financially dependent on them and who should get benefits when they die. Our current system shortchanges any dependent who isn’t married to a wage earner.

What about single people? Are they less deserving of the legal protections couples get? Why should rights, privileges and protections be based on anyone’s ability to find “Mr. /Ms. Right” and maintain a sexual/romantic relationship? Do other kinds of relationships (like parent-child, or adult siblings, or single best friends who live together and rely on each other financially and emotionally) not deserve protection?

I don’t think we have to aspire to some narrow ideal of family/couplehood to deserve rights. We deserve rights because we’re human beings, not because we’re achieving some level of similarity to the heterosexual ideal.

So you might be surprised to hear that I also love the idea of marriage. I love the idea of commitment, of getting community and family support for a relationship, and of the accountability to that community and family. I think anyone who wants to should have a ceremony and make a commitment and throw a big party. But that shouldn’t affect whether they then get health insurance, or get to take time off to take a sick person to the doctor, or are able to sign a permission form for a field trip.

I’m not fighting for access to marriage, and I wish that wasn’t where the gay rights movement was putting most of its effort and resources. (Violence, housing, employment, education, anyone?) But (with apologies to Groucho Marx), if someone is trying to keep me out of this club, I want in. How dare anyone say that I don’t deserve access to marriage and all it brings? How dare they say I, and my relationships, aren’t good enough?

I’d just prefer that LGBTQ people be recognized and accepted for being human beings, period. And that all human beings, regardless of relationship status, are assured their rights. That’s why I’m not celebrating the president’s “evolution.”

Her wish to be recognized as a human being is great; however, there are thousands of LEGAL rights (that one cannot get w/personal contracts etc.)--that are enshrined at both the state and federal level--that are denied based on the inability to marry one's chosen partner.


They are not going to remove those legal and civil protections/rights for opposite sex couples, so marriage equality for all couples is the only answer.

lets just hope that B.O. is sincere ,and not just looking for votes with the election so near. I dont trust any politician..like I always say..time tell's all truth's

i agree wholeheartedly. i'm frustrated for a lot of reasons.

* obama's statement doesn't actually mean anything concrete for queer folks. it's just a statement.
* the only reason he came out and said this now is because it's an election year.
* he's still allowing a civil rights issue to be treated as a states' rights issue, and as we saw in the civil rights movement, that does not work.
* so much of the money and work in our community goes towards this single issue, while we are experiencing violence, bullying, unemployment, incarceration, police brutality, etc. etc. etc.
* the people who will benefit most from passing gay marriage ( for example, upper-class white gays and lesbians who are seeking to be accepted as part of a heteronormative society) are not the most vulnerable people in our community who need our protection (for example, homeless youth, incarcerated trans* women of color, queer sex workers, etc.). and the people who DO need obama to speak out for them will never matter to him - or to any political candidate - because we will never be "normative" enough to be assimilated into mainstream heteronormative society. we can't donate enough money to win them a campaign with the gay voting bloc. we don't make for good poster children.

i love the idea of marriage, too, but i agree with the author that it's frustrating that we've put so much emphasis on gay marriage to the exclusion of getting rights for everyone that should not have to be distributed according to what the church and the state think of our relationships and families and how those institutions define us. and to the exclusion of caring about the other issues, many of them life or death, that are deeply affecting folks in our community.

edited to add: and allowing same-sex couples to marry does not equate to marriage equality for all people. it just equates to marriage equality for most monogamous heterosexual and homosexual people.

He's looking for votes. He's had 3 and a half years to say what he said.

well he was under pressure after Biden said something,,took him 3 1/2 yrs too

I agree mostly with the author. I don't think the drive for marriage equality in the US is particularly healthy or productive as far as gaining equality for all queer people and the diversity of struggles we continue to face globally. In Canada and other nations around the world, same-sex marriage has been legal for some years now. The consequence is that all those who were all "ra-ra gay rights" when marriage equality was by and large the only issue anyone put on the table, all went away once marriage equality had been achieved. These are mostly white, able-bodied, normative well off gays and lesbians who fit/want the picket fence ideal. And so discrimination and violence against queer people of colour, working class or homeless queer people, queer people with disabilities etc. get completely ignored. The movement really has learned very little from the mistakes of second wave feminism and its white middle class-centrism.

So in the context of the US president's support for gay marriage...I think it's a non-issue. If he supports equality for all American citizens, then it should have been assumed that he supports gay marriage. But at the same time, I wouldn't say its out of the blue either. Even before he was elected he had expressed support for same-sex marriage, and throughout his time as the American president he's repealed DADT...so I don't think he's necessarily changing his opinions for election purposes. He seems to be expressing something he's always been fairly open about. So as I said above...seems like a non-issue only made an issue by normative gays who have a very simple perspective of what queer rights mean and who it encompasses, and by religious fundies who freak out and cry Armageddon every time a politician speaks out against homophobia, anti-woman attitudes or racism.

I am glad President Obama said it before the election. I think it will hurt him with religious POC voters in the South especially, so it means more to me that he said it before the election.

Should more be happening for our people? yes!!!

But I never imagined that a sitting President would actually say that during my lifetime!

Cheers President Obama and thank you!

I hate these people as guess what, WE DON'T LIVE IN THAT WORLD THAT YOU WANT!

I really think gay people stamping their feet and insisting that gays don't need marriage are hurting the cause, sorry but I do. It's very carriage-before-the-horse.

Yes it would be ideal to live in that world where gender and wedded bliss don't matter, but until we get there can we focus on something that the mainstream world/ Governments/ Religions/ Allies will understand? Can we just have a chance to be equal to everyone else first, before we start trying to change the society we live in. Surely equality is more important than fantasy right now?
People are dying out there, families are being split up , lovers are losing the right to see their loved ones, but these tossers have so much privilege that they can't be bothered to care about any of that? Fcuk them.

Things that happen when gays are denied marriage

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-...rrested-in-nc/
https://www.facebook.com/chirp01

My late partner's family told me I was their family. That is, I was their family right up until the accident in 2003 that took her life. Sharon's family, led by her mother, (the Matriarch of the clan), turned on me so quickly that my head spun. If you've never had to deal with the family of your suddenly dead partner, (not a legal spouse), you should consider yourself lucky.

While their instant hostility, attempts to shut me out of the funeral, as well as their efforts to erase me from Sharon's history were a series of devestating betrayals, the whole mess was also an extremely edifying experience. I asked Sharon's mother point blank why she was doing this. She didn't answer me directly, but she did turn to the rest of the assembled family and said, "Well, they weren't really married. Not really... Well, they weren't!!"

Oh.

Fast forward to 2008 when I had to plan the funeral of my next girlfriend. Caren's family had never valued or respected her. They didn't choose to pay for any of the expenses related to her death, but they were happy to hear about her forgotten insurance policy. No, they didn't offer to pay for any of Caren's expenses out of the policy to which I was not entitled.

Marraige equality would do more in one single pen stroke to combat poverty amongst gay seniors, (surviving partners are currently denied social security benefits of the deceased), gain immigration equality for bi-national couples, secure the rights of children in adoptive and foster care situations, and to reduce violence against lgbt youth as well as adults, than a 100% increase in funding for all the peace and social justice programs put together. And it would do it instantly.

Marraige has meant many things to many cultures over the years, but there is no culture for which recognition of same hasn't been the basis of a great deal of social structure. There's a certain amount of cultural myopia and an annoying level of privilege at play when anyone suggests that this particular battle isn't really important.

(((( cheryl ))))))) grl i'm soo sooo sry ..

Cheers to President Obama. I don't think there is any clear cut political advantage, and it could in fact hurt him.

I am on the Democratic Party's email list and I got an email from President Obama where he not only says he supports same sex marriage but talks about having friends, members of staff and his daughters having friends who have same sex parents. He sounds like a real person who has same sex parents as part of his and his children's lives. That means a lot to me.

I don't think this is political spin and I don't think I am being naive about it. He placed his support in context of people he has around him. Yeah it would have been nice to have had this happen earlier but people do evolve and change. He may have had to get up the guts to take the political risk but the fact that he did it is huge.

It would be great to be treated as a human. We have to fight for equal rights to be treated as such.

Thoughts
 

Your last sentence strikes a chord in me Bulldog, all I want are my civil rights, the same rights that heterinormative couples get when coupled. I may never marry Grant but that doesn't mean my commitment is less valid or that I shouldn't be able to claim him on my taxes.


I'm happy that Obama did what he did because it's a good example for his daughters I bet they are very proud of him.:)

it's not that i don't think that gay marriage IS an issue, it's just that i don't think it should be the ONLY issue. maybe that makes me a privileged tosser.

i've been treated horribly and screwed over when my parents died, which scares the shit out of me when it comes to anything happening to myself or my partner, and it would make both of our lives a lot easier (with health insurance, for starters) if we could get married. it would make me feel safer in the event that something happens to us, given that neither of us are close to our families.

but at the same time...the people i am closest to in my community are dealing with issues like violence, police brutality, being unable to work or go to the bathroom, and homelessness, and i can't ignore the fact that those things have had a bigger and more immediate impact on our lives than whether we are allowed to marry. yet those issues will never get the kind of support that gay marriage does. i respect that those may not be the biggest or most immediate issues for everyone in the lgbtq community, but they are immediate and life-threatening issues for some of us.

and regardless of how anyone feels about gay marriage, obama's statement is a nice gesture but it doesn't have any concrete meaning.

also...we live in a society that is fundamentally unequal.

i respect that gay marriage will help a lot of people in the immediate future, but it does not mean that all people will have marriage equality, and it won't make our fundamentally unequal society that much less unequal. it will make a lot of people's lives easier in the interim, so yeah, i'd be really happy if it were equally applied throughout the u.s. (i.e. not treated as a "separate but unequal" states' rights issue). but imho it should not be treated as the only issue or the endgame if we are really talking about wanting equality.

i am troubled because i frequently am in a position of educating straight people about lgbtq issues, and many of them are completely unaware of other immediate and life-threatening issues besides gay marriage (and maybe bullying of queer youth). i'm worried about the perception in some circles that if gay marriage is passed, we'll be living in a "post-homophobic" society. and i'm worried about how many people we're leaving behind.

I don't see how denying gays equal rights to straights is helping the equality cause?

Surely we want to make being gay as legally safe and as normalised as possible so gays won't be discriminated against simply for being gay (or trans)?