Syndicate and Hague

Just as I am sick of Tony Perkins and the bile of the Family Research Council that he runs, I am sick of the people on my side of the aisle who castigate the GLBT folks who have been working to win the right to get married because they see it as too normative.

Feministing highlighted an article off of Alternet by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore that just succeeded in irritating the hell out of me. I’m just going to paste the quotes in and dissect as we go. Have fun! If you get bored, check out this week’s Savage Love, in which Dan Savage reams some straight people who plan on getting married but are relationship idiots because Tony Perkins tormented him. (That’s all Perkins knows how to do.) Or you could watch Stephen Colbert undercut Perkins on The Colbert Report from last night. So those are your other options. On to me tormenting fellow lefties!

Sycamore begins by saying that she flat out doesn’t support gay marriage and, to illustrate why, says:

Gay marriage does nothing to address fundamental problems of inequality. What is needed is universal access to basic necessities like housing, health care, food, and the benefits now obtained through citizenship (like the right to stay in this country)…

Nope. It sure doesn’t address those things. When you start with sweeping expectations like that in an essay, it’s pretty impossible to argue. And yet…I continue.

Legalized gay marriage means only that certain people in a specific type of long-term, monogamous relationship sanctioned by a state contract might be able to access benefits. While marriage could confer inclusion under a spouse’s health-care policy, it does nothing to provide such a policy. Marriage might ensure hospital visitation rights, but not for anyone without a spouse. Marriage may allow for inheritance rights between spouses, but what if there is nothing to inherit?

Now, I hate to be nitpicky (no I don’t), but you don’t actually have to be monogamous–straight or gay–to get married. You just have to pick someone as primary partner. Other than that, there’s nothing Sycamore says here that is inherently wrong, but the inverse argument doesn’t really help. I mean, what if there is something to inherit? What if there is a health policy that can be provided? An argument that bases itself on absence isn’t very meaningful.

For a long time, queers have married straight friends for citizenship or health care, but this has never been enshrined as “progress.” The majority of queers — single or coupled (but not desiring marriage), monogamous or polyamorous, jobless or marginally employed — would remain excluded from the much-touted benefits of legalized gay marriage.

Dude. Marrying straight friends has been what is known as “working the system.” Of course it isn’t progress. It reaffirms the double standard of what relationships are worth. As for the “majority of queers” remaining excluded from marriage benefits…how is she coming up with what constitutes a majority? Who does she consider queer? I’m in no way saying that marriage is a saving grace for the queer community, but let’s stop throwing around vague quantitative terms. Give me numbers, even rounded ones. I’d also argue that jobless and marginally employed folks wouldn’t necessarily not benefit–especially if their spouses were employed…

And let’s not forget the history of marriage as a legal method for keeping property within specific dynasties (property that originally included women and slaves). In fact, marriage still exists as a central venue for spousal and child abuse — there’s a reason divorce is so popular, and suicide attempts among queer teens so prevalent.

Marriage=venue for abuse=queer teen suicide. The leaps in logic here, ignoring the complete lack of data correlating these things…just, wow. Queer teens are harassed, are a part of society where queer relationships are denigrated, and are made to feel alienated by the larger culture. This happens with/without married parents. Show me data that says that queer teen suicide is predominantly taking place in households with married parents and I’ll eat my words. But right now…dumping bad things into a paragraph together doesn’t make an argument.

Also? Bringing up the history of marriage? The Family Research Council does that too. Moving on.

In fact, the push for gay marriage has shifted advocacy away from essential services like HIV education, AIDS health care, drug treatment, domestic violence prevention, and homeless care — all crucial needs for far more queers than marriage could ever be.

Agree/disagree. In the absence of the push for gay marriage, would these things be getting addressed better? I’m not entirely sure I buy that argument.

You know, I have a number of friends who have worked hard over the course of years and years to deal with domestic/sexual violence and the only constant I’ve seen in terms of funding is eternal crisis. There is never enough money, they are always overworked, severely underpaid, and stressed to an extraordinary point. Also, a lot of these things rely on grants in addition to private donation. Grants aren’t on the menu for marriage advocates, so that money isn’t even in the picture.

I can’t say for sure that resources aren’t being diverted, but I question whether a=b.

The spectacle around gay marriage draws attention away from critical issues — like ending U.S. wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, stopping massive Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids across the country, and challenging the never-ending assault on anyone living outside of conventional norms.

True that. But I’m afraid that arguing that we’re doing ourselves a disservice by drawing attention to ourselves is defeatist. There will always be more “pressing” issues (homelessness, war, etc.) than exclusively queer rights. And I’m talking about more than marriage here. Someone will always be able to argue that something like war trumps civil rights. But just because you can make the argument doesn’t mean it’s a good one.

While many straight people are reaping the benefits of gay liberation and discovering new ways of loving, lusting for and caring for one another, the gay marriage movement is busy fighting for a 1950s model of white-picket fence “we’re just like you” normalcy. And that’s no reason to celebrate.

Oh, come on! That’s how it ends? The trite “if you want something they have, you’re vanilla and boring and not one of us” line? Ugh.

Look, whether or not marriage is personally something I want or not, I think it’s terribly presumptuous to ask queer/GLBT people to identify as transgressive. There’s nothing wrong with monogamy, there’s nothing wrong with having a primary partner if you sleep with more than one person, and there’s nothing wrong with consenting adults figuring out their relationships however they’d like. My problem is with any of us forcing our values on the others.

Marriage is not the solution, but in a society where the very question of whether or not GLBT people should be allowed into the club sends our entire society into a manic episode, it’s not something to be so easily dismissed.

Back when I had a customer service job and had to interact with random people when I was younger, I found that a fake wedding ring made my life a million times easier. If some idiot hit on me and I said I had a boyfriend, it didn’t even dent his game–if I said I was married, it was usually over. Despite the problems marriage has in our society, it still carries with it a level of respect for the relationship that you just don’t get otherwise. It’s a big deal, culturally, and to pretend that it and all the privilege it gets you are some minor irrelevancy in the face of Big Problems like homelessness, war, etc…well, that’s just naive. Or willfully ignorant.

This post crosses a couple of topics that have been on my mind lately. Little things, you know, like pervasive racism and the second-class status of GLBT folks in this country.

Jack and Jill Politics wrote on a particularly heinous op-ed in the Chicago Tribune last week. The article embodies a lot of the problems I’ve had with Clinton’s campaign–which has used racist sentiment…actually, let’s be honest…it’s used white supremacist sentiment to rally rural and older white voters. Obama is too uppity for his own good, know what I mean?

Anyway, Kathleen Parker’s nasty piece dwells on the concept of “full-blooded” Americanness.

Full-bloodedness is an old coin that’s gaining currency in the new American realm. Meaning: Politics may no longer be so much about race and gender as about heritage, core values, and made-in-America. Just as we once and still have a cultural divide in this country, we now have a patriot divide.

Now, I understand that Parker may think her own audience is blind to their own motivations, but how is something about “heritage” and “made in America” and not about race?

She’s hardly masking her racist white supremacist sentiment:

It’s about blood equity, heritage and commitment to hard-won American values. And roots.

Man, you really can’t get much more KKK than that.

Here’s the thing, it’s all code. She’s not talking about my background. Fuck all that Mayflower and Daughters of the American Revolution bullshit. The WASPs never did think much of the Irish or the Slavs. But when she talks about full-blooded Americans, she’s also not using that code to slur me. It’s not about the old immigrants who are now neatly rolled up into whiteness, it’s the new immigrants…like Obama’s dad.

Now, where this does become about me is when the issue of…

Yet, white Americans primarily—and Southerners, rural and small-town folks especially—have been put on the defensive for their concerns with “guns, God and gays.”

And the justification for both their racism and their general hatred of anything not like them is:

What they know is that their forefathers fought and died for an America that has worked pretty well for more than 200 years. What they sense is that their heritage is being swept under the carpet while multiculturalism becomes the new national narrative. And they fear what else might get lost in the remodeling of America.

Today, Governor Pawlenty vetoed the SF 960 bill that the Minnesota House and Senate passed. It would have allowed local governments in Minnesota to provide domestic partner benefits. I realize that “teh gayz” are a big selling point for the Republicans in a time when their economic and international policies are being shown for the shams that they are, but damn if it doesn’t break my heart every time they try to make life harder for us.

We’re part of this “multiculturalism” that Parker and her allies are scared of. (Or, rather, that she exploits this line of thinking to advance her name and get a book deal at some point. Controversy sells!)

And why are they scared of it? Because their heritage is being swept under the carpet? Bullshit. It’s the time-honored tradition of: if you’re doing better, it must be at some cost to me, so I don’t want your lot to improve.

Does it actually hurt heterosexual couples if I got Megan health insurance through my job or vice versa? I mean, unlike y’all, we have to pay taxes on the amount paid (FYI: that’s approximately $100 a month in taxes for health care at the U. On top of the normal cost of adding someone to your insurance.).

In order to be against gay marriage or domestic partner benefits or civil unions or black people becoming president or women becoming president or whatever, you have to believe that if any of these things occurs, you will have lost something.

And, you know what? If you think that people don’t deserve the same rights and privileges that you have because you’re afraid of a level playing field, you need to really think about what that means. It means you don’t think you’re good enough, it means you’re insecure about your position in the world, and it means you are petty and exploitative and just plain mean.

Congrats to Californians, by the way, whose largely Republican (I believe 6 of the 7 judges were Republican appointments) court said that not allowing gay marriages in CA was unconstitutional. It’s going to kick off a firestorm, but if marriage is going to remain a thing in this country (um, that’s a definite), then it needs to be across the board. Knock it down like miscegenation was knocked down.

/rant

I have lived in apartments for a long time. A long time. The first seven years of my life and the last 13 as well.

I’m thinking of something tonight, mostly because it’s happening as I’m writing, but I’m thinking about how odd it is to share a residence with someone or some people who you’re otherwise unconnected to. You hear their televisions and annoying music–sometimes their phone conversations depending on the volume and pitch of a person’s voice.

I’ve learned to tune most things out, though at peak emotional moments I sometimes can’t help but listen. Screaming fights have always been a challenge for me. I hate them. But I can’t seem to break away. I’m morbidly curious about the fights I hear through the walls.

As an adult–as someone who is in control of her own life–it boggles my mind that you would continue sharing your space with someone who you repeatedly and on multiple occasions screamingly called an asshole or a bitch or any other string of expletives that I’ve heard through the various floors and walls of my different apartments.

Over and over and over. Screaming. Who wants to live like that?

It’s weird to have such intimate knowledge of people you don’t know. I’ve often known more about careless neighbors’ love lives than their girlfriends or boyfriends did. I knew what they sounded like when they had sex. But it was never the dramas or the sex that kept me uncomfortably entranced.

It was always the yelling. I guess the difference is that I understand interpersonal drama, relationship drama, and everyone has sex. But the screaming and yelling is beyond me. I really need to snap out of the morbid curiosity trance and turn my stereo on. It’s not entertainment…