The Big Lie: Marriage and "Tradition" (An Open Letter to Obama)

[Safe_Bet]

This is just so beautifully said... (Bolds are mine)

The Big Lie: Marriage and "Tradition" (An Open Letter to Obama)
By Melvina Young, Kansas City Star Midwest Voices columnist 2007
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Dear Barack (I can still call you “Barack,” right?)

If you have any plans for the rights of gay and lesbian Americans that don’t involve high speed and a very large bus, it’s time to say what those are.

Because in the battle for the equal rights of gays, lesbians and their families you’ve been MIA. Especially on two recent and very visible fronts: “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and securing same-sex marriage.

Given the chance to confront “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” directly by using presidential authority given you under federal law to retain any member of the military the President deems critical to our national security, you appear to be letting “DADT” push out West Point graduate, Army National Guard Officer, Iraqi war vet and Arabic language expert, Dan Choi.

We get that you’re a cautious man. Nobody operating in the vicinity of reality expected a Harry Trumanesque “sexual orientation desegregation” of the U.S. military through executive order. (Though that kind of political bravery would have been incredible coming from the nation’s first black President.) Still, short of stopping the military from ousting Choi, even some symbolic sign of support for him and the more than 12,500 military men and women ousted under DADT would be greatly appreciated.

Then last week your Justice Department submitted a brief in support of the Defense of Marriage Act, an inherently biased law which not only denies same-sex couples federal benefits of marriage but allows individual states the right to deny recognition of marriages performed in other states.

That was shocking and disappointing.

What was painful and outrageous was that the Justice Department brief appropriated DOMA’s insidious language analogizing homosexuality and same-sex marital relationships to incestuous relationships.

What was devastating was that by disclaiming DOMA’s violation of the Constitution’s “full faith and credit” clause, the Justice Department has opened the door to the creation of several “separate and unequal” classes of marriage within the United States, with same-sex marriage receiving a big red “second class” stamp across the face.

Not only does DOMA clearly discriminate against same-sex couples and families headed by same-sex couples, but your Justice Department is helping it move forward on a lie: that two-partner, heterosexual marriage is the “traditional and universally recognized form of marriage.”

That lie is based on a bigger lie that one often hears touted by religious opponents of same-sex marriage: that marriage itself has been an unchanging and unchangeable institution for two thousand years.

Leaving aside the history of legalized same-sex marriage in pre-modern Europe and Asia (You may be interested to see the works of university professors John Boswell, Gary Leupp and William Eskridge) and the failure of current nations which have recently legalized same-sex marriage to fall to ruin and make their dying flops onto that “dustbin of history” Pat Robertson warns about, over historical time and geographical space “traditional” marriage has looked many different ways.

Depending on the time, society, economy and “tradition” under question, traditional marriage has taken polygamous (one man, multiple wives) and even polyandrous (one woman, multiple husbands) forms as well as the opposite-sex couple formation currently fetishized. Even this is a laughably broad and simplistic characterization of the history of human marriage.

Not only has marriage changed greatly over the course of thousands of years, but it’s changed substantially in our own nation’s short history. Most often as a result of the demands of democracy itself.

American democracy has demanded the inclusion of formerly excluded groups and forged change in the rights of individuals within marriage as the rights of less empowered partners (women) had to be increasingly considered under the law.

Stick with me. I’ve got a couple of actual examples:

One hundred forty years ago enslaved blacks had neither rights of legal marriage nor rights in the ownership of their children. Marriage rights for enslaved blacks would have undermined the property ownership rights of white slaveholders who supplied plenty of biblical and legal support for slavery. Consequently, marriage, as recognized under the state, wasn’t between “one man and one woman.” It was between “one white man and one white woman.”

The end of the Civil War, the destruction of slavery and the federal protections of Reconstruction allowed most African Americans the attainment of the emotional enjoyment, economic security and civil protections of legal marriage for the first time. Something which could not have been imagined even five years before when marriage between enslaved couples hinged on slaveholder whim and the availability of a broom.

One hundred twenty years ago, white women were still legally “covered” in their marriages. Under “laws of coverture” women didn’t have the right of ownership of property or children. Nor did they have the right to enter contracts (though this varied somewhat by state with progressive states offering more rights and conservative states restricting them.) A woman’s property given by her father became her husband’s to control. Nor did most women have the right of divorce despite physical or sexual abuse, or economic mismanagement or deprivation. In a world where white men held economic and political power, women seeking divorce were bound to lose any economic security, their children, their social standing and their reputation as “honorable.”

But it’s only been within the last three decades that many provisions within marriage we take for granted were won. For example, women won the right to get credit in their own names, or have an equal say in where their families would reside More importantly, as women’s rights activists agitated against the right of husbands to force sex in the marital bed, married women won legal protections against marital rape. (Before the 1970s there was no such thing as “rape” in marriage.)

And, a little over fifty years ago, interracial marriage was against the law in over half the states of the union. Moreover, it was denied federal recognition until the Supreme Court decided Loving vs. Virginia in 1967. In the year that you were born, Mr. Obama your own parents would have been denied the right to marry in over 19 states.

As American democracy has expanded and demanded that the rights of individuals be respected, marriage changed too. Why not now?

If you can understand that being gay is a natural, healthy state of being which can’t be changed through “reparative therapies” (as does the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychiatric Association and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry) how can you not fight fully and forcefully to affect equal rights for gay and lesbian Americans?

If you follow the latest evidence that children are discerning they are gay at increasingly younger ages - years before sexual desire or the urge to sleep with another person or “live a lifestyle” emerges - how can you not support giving gay and lesbian persons full access to equality?

If you are devoted to the welfare, health, happiness and equality of all our nation’s children, how can you commit at least 10% of those children to less than 100% of that health, happiness and equality?

If you note the number of religious communities which openly accept and affirm gay, lesbian and transgendered people because they see how far we stand as human beings from where God would have us be, and you realize how other denominations are sincerely wrestling with their spiritual brothers and sisters (much as churches did over the issue of racial segregation just 50 years ago) why aren’t you wrestling harder and faster?

You have the historical perspective to realize that against each and every one of these groups (African-Americans, women, interracial couples) scripture was cited and “What God wants” was invoked.

Now, in the clarity of hindsight, we can see that the deep and sincere religious conviction of southern segregationists was as wrong as those of Christian men (and women) fearful of giving women the vote and equality in marriage, and as misguided as those of religious whites who believed allowing interracial couples to marry violated God’s law.

Have we yet to learn the lesson that God’s love is boundless and wide? It’s human understanding that is far too narrow.

Finally if you are a believer in our Constitutional creed that “All men are created equal” and have the historical understanding that group after group in our great nation (African Americans, white women, Native Americans, Asians, Mexican-Americans, the disabled) have had to fight against the “tyranny of the majority” to become part of that “All men,” why won’t you put the full force of your power behind ensuring the entrance of this group of Americans?

During your campaign you often criticized then President Bush for being hermetically sealed in a “bubble” of privilege and power. For losing touch with “normal, everyday” people and their problems. You appeared to have empathy with other human beings across a spectrum of identity, experience and purpose.

But since your own ascent to the highest office in the land, you seem to have forgotten those “normal, everyday people” who don’t have the right to claim their families legally; who don’t have the right to claim marital recognition under the 1,138 statutory provisions the Government Accountability Office asserts determine the rights, privileges and responsibilities of marriage; who don’t have the equal right to secure their property and assure inheritance for their families; who don’t have the right to assumed and uncontested custody of their children nor the equal right to foster or adopt other children; who don’t have the right to insure all family members medically or even make medical decisions for them; who don’t have the right to know the fate of partners fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan before “approved family members” know and decide to tell them; who don’t even have the automatic right to sit beside the deathbed of a lifelong partner.

Barack, during the campaign you appeared to be a man who’d take the fact of each American’s human pain with you through the doors of high office. You appeared to be a man ready to use the power bestowed upon you by our trust to do what is right in the name of democracy, justice and equality.

For those Americans within the LGBT community and the straight people who love and stand beside them, I must ask you: Have appearances been deceiving?

I've gotta ask, too: Have appearances been deceiving?

 

[John Doe]

Tl;dr