MARRIAGE AND MEDIA

There may have been dancing in the streets after U.S. District Chief Judge Vaughn R. Walker declared California’s Proposition 8 unconstitutional, but the media I viewed seemed instantly caught up in reporting that the proponents of Prop 8 were certainly going to appeal. The anchors on the major networks and cable can’t resist reporting everything like a gladiatorial fight. If someone is for, someone else must be against. If the gays and lesbians win one round, they will face defeat in the next.

What was missing in so much of the reporting I saw was any sense of the breadth of Judge Walker’s opinion. It is striking in its thoroughness. It’s Findings of Fact run over 50 pages, detailing reports of psychologists, sociologists, and historians. These findings give evidence of continued discrimination against gays and lesbians while, at the same time, affirming that same-sex couples are substantially the same as different-sexed ones. The children of same-sex couples do as well or better than those of straights. Gays and lesbians are productive members of society, but discrimination against them adds serious stress to their lives. Hate crimes against gays and lesbians have not abated, and they are often likely to be violent in nature. “Domestic partnerships” are by any measure seen as distinctively less than “marriage.” On the basis of studies in Massachusetts, there is no evidence that marriage equality for same-sex couples has affected the rate of traditional marriage, divorce, or out-of-wedlock births in that state.

You would think a few of these findings might find their way onto the airwaves, but no. The broadcasters are too interested in the really sexy issue of how quickly Judge Walker stayed his own decision and how fast the Prop 8-ers filed their appeal. That Judge Walker dismantled the internally contradictory evidence of the Prop-8 defendants is hardly mentioned, unless you are watching Rachel Maddow or Keith Olbermann. You know, the biased liberal media.

The larger point is this: news coverage in America is, with rare exception, superficial, biased not necessarily right nor left but in favor of conflict and sound bites, which is necessarily a reactionary mode. Those who are in the LGBT community—like those in other minority communities—learn the lesson that we can hardly expect the media to represent us credibly. Television is a visual medium: easier to get pictures of us dancing in the streets celebrating a still premature victory than to explain the rigorous argument of a U.S. District Chief Judge for the Northern District of California that “Proposition 8 is unconstitutional under both the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses.” That would require explaining the meaning of those terms, the history of the 14th Amendment in which those terms are inscribed, and crediting moral weight to the LGBT movement. This last would be in contradistinction to the high-horse morality of people who pretend no animus toward gay people but do everything in their power to deny us daily dignity. Think of all those Republican Senators (Jeff Sessions, anyone?) who raked Elena Kagan over the coals because she disputed the military presence on the Harvard campus over “don’t ask, don’t tell” which was an affront to Harvard’s own LGBT anti-discrimination policies.

Oh, dear. I write all this and I don’t even think marriage is such a sacrosanct institution in the first place—but I sure can smell a rat when an option is denied me because I’m light in the loafers.

For the full decision, go to this New York Times site:
http://documents.nytimes.com/us-district-court-decision-perry-v-schwarzenegger?ref=us

TRUE MINDS and MARRIAGE

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments.

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 116


When I invited a friend to join me to see The Kids Are All Right, I sensed that he wasn’t persuaded by my description. It’s a satire about a lesbian couple whose teenage children go in search of their biological father. When found, Dad enters the picture and disrupts family relations. I thought my good friend might at least be persuaded by the presence of Annette Bening and Julianne Moore co-starring as the mid-life lesbians navigating the entry of a sensitive but testosterone fueled male into the geometry of their family configuration. No deal. I had to see the movie on my own.

I understood my friend’s hesitations. For those of us who came of age after Stonewall but before AIDS, gay liberation didn’t mean entering into middle-class institutions like marriage. In fact, the idea of marriage seemed foreign if not inimical to notions of sexual freedom.

Yet The Kids Are All Right, Lisa Cholodenko’s rueful look at the blessings of gay/lesbian family life, is interesting for what it tells us about the way we live now. Well, the way some of the LGBT bourgeoisie do. And the truth is that gay men and lesbians who have children together by whatever route look shockingly like every other middle-class family. Tell this to the constipated right-wing moralizers who support DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act), which includes a roster of politicians who argue that same-sex marriage is an attack on the institution of the family and marriage itself.

Au contraire, Mary. Today, same-sex marriage is a mirror of the heterosexual version, with the exception that same-sex parents might raise their children to be tolerant of, and perhaps even welcoming to, people who are different in any way. This, happily, is true of some straight parents as well.

So it is galling to be on the side (at least on the principle of equality before the law) of same-sex marriage—only because too many rights attach to marriage which LGBT people miss out on: from rights of inheritance to Social Security benefits. It is galling to have to oppose an act of the 1990s which was passed by so-called upholders of family values. Might we conduct a survey of how many of the 342 in the House of Representatives and how many of the 85 in the Senate who voted for DOMA in 1996 had at least one divorce to their “credit,” how many were in fact serial monogamists, how many adulterers, how many closet cases, etc.? To say nothing of this same Public Law No. 104-199, 110 Stat. 2419 (DOMA in legal speak) being signed into law by none other than Bill Clinton, hardly a model citizen when it came to marital fidelity. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that!) Here are DOMA’s most crucial provisions:

1. No state (or other political subdivision within the United States) needs to treat a relationship between persons of the same sex as a marriage, even if the relationship is considered a marriage in another state. (DOMA, Section 2)
2. The federal government defines marriage as a legal union exclusively between one man and one woman. (DOMA, Section 3)

My own indifference to the issue of same-sex marriage was longstanding, and in many ways it was a response to the zeitgeist of my youth, when the Bloomsbury Group of the early 20th Century, Virginia Woolf chief among them, was being rediscovered. Having read Nigel Nicholson’s remarkable Portrait of a Marriage, which recounted the bohemian union of his queer parents Harold Nicholson and Vita Sackville-West (one of Virginia’s inamorata), I could hardly have responded otherwise. If being gay meant you couldn’t marry, and if (straight) marriage meant a lifetime of compromises both social and sexual, then you had better marry for companionship and put sex in its proper place: outside the domestic setting.

Here is Nigel Nicholson in Portrait of a Marriage writing of his mother’s love for Violet Trefusis:

Now that I know everything I love her more, as my father did ... She was a rebel ... and though she did not know it, she fought for more than Violet. She fought for the right to love, men and women, rejecting the conventions that marriage demands exclusive love, and that women should love only men, and men only women. For this she was prepared to give up everything. Yes, she may have been mad, as she later said, but it was a magnificent folly. She may have been cruel, but it was a cruelty on a heroic scale. How can I despise the violence of such passion?

Let’s watch what happens next. Now that Judge Joseph L. Tauro of United States District Court in Boston has declared it unconstitutional for the federal government to discriminate against Massachusetts same-sex citizens who are legally married within that state, we find that the Obama administration is likely to appeal. Must it?

If it does, we can be sure that bastion of propriety, the Supreme Court, will take up the matter. Uh-oh. All bets are off.