THE ENGAGEMENT
America’s Quarter-Century Struggle Over Same-Sex Marriage
By Sasha Issenberg
In 1989, when The New Republic published Andrew Sullivan’s “Here Comes the Groom: A (Conservative) Case for Gay Marriage,” few L.G.B.T.Q. activists took the proposition seriously. They had more pressing concerns, ones further up the hierarchy of needs. Queer activists were fighting to survive a plague in the face of a president who, like his predecessor, willfully ignored it. Three years earlier, the Supreme Court had upheld a Georgia sodomy law that effectively prohibited queer Americans from having sex with one another. There did not exist a federal law to protect their right to employment, housing or health care.
Then came the 1990s. In “The Engagement,” a lively, encyclopedic survey of the struggle for marriage equality, the journalist Sasha Issenberg emphasizes an overlapping, conflicting and often serendipitous series of events in that decade: a complex and chaotic chain reaction that thrust same-sex marriage from the realm of conservative conjecture — or, in the case of the marriage pioneer Evan Wolfson, a Harvard Law School thesis — to the forefront of the American consciousness, to the top of the gay political agenda and, eventually, to the halls of the Supreme Court.
To be certain, as Issenberg admits, the concept of queer marriage wasn’t really an invention of the ’90s, or even the decade prior. Same-sex marriages — ranging from symbolic ceremonies between lovers to more functional, economic unions — have taken place in America since its founding. With the rise of the fledgling homophile movement in the 1950s, activists began publicly contemplating the idea. “One would think that in a movement demanding acceptance for this group, legalized marriage would be one of its primary issues,” declared One, the homophile movement’s pioneering magazine, in 1953.
Marriage never became a primary issue for homophile activists, though, and there’s no record of a gay couple attempting to get legally married until 1970, when two young men, Jack Baker and Michael McConnell, applied for a marriage license in Hennepin County, Minn. (The unfavorable decision in their subsequent lawsuit, Baker v. Nelson, was overturned in 2015 by the landmark ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges.) In the following decade, despite the prodding of advocates like Wolfson and Sullivan, the possibility of same-sex marriage failed to take precedence.
On Dec. 17, 1990, three same-sex couples, spurred by a local gay activist named Bill Woods yet lacking the support of any major L.G.B.T.Q. organization, applied for marriage licenses in Honolulu. Predictably, the state’s attorney general denied the licenses, but a straight lawyer, Dan Foley, offered to sue the state on the couples’ behalf. Less than three years later the Hawaii Supreme Court released its astonishing decision in Baehr v. Lewin. Queer couples’ freedom to marry, it concluded, was a basic civil right. Never before had a court — on all of Earth, let alone in America — acknowledged that fact.
Other historians have done a fine job chronicling how the dominoes began to fall after Baehr. Lillian Faderman, a founding mother of lesbian history, traced the “seismic” effects of the ruling on L.G.B.T.Q. activism and American politics in her 2015 book, “The Gay Revolution.” And last August, William Eskridge Jr., the dean of gay legal scholarship, and Christopher R. Riano published “Marriage Equality,” a 1,000-page magnum opus about the political and legal path to Obergefell.
For Issenberg, however, the duality of the political conflict — the two sides of the “engagement” — is central. Most significant, he implies that the marriage issue would not have taken hold of L.G.B.T.Q. politics if it had not been for the vociferous opposition of the religious right. Because conservatives deemed marriage so crucial — and because they went to such lengths to keep queer Americans away from the institution — they successfully (and perhaps unwittingly) laid a trap, forcing activists to defend gay marriage and concede the importance of the institution. Issenberg’s book, then, serves as a 900-page case study of what the sociologist Tina Fetner refers to as the “symbiotic” relationship between conservatives and queer activists. The religious right told us we couldn’t have marriage, so we decided we needed it.
If that’s the case, gay couples owe no organization more than the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In great detail, Issenberg demonstrates exactly how the Mormon Church constructed a secretive campaign in Hawaii, built an ecumenical alliance of anti-marriage churches and led the mammoth crusade in favor of Proposition 8, the California ballot proposal that added a gay marriage ban to the state Constitution in 2008. In that brawl, Mormons contributed half of the $40 million raised to support the measure. Later, after being accused of “money laundering” and concealing the sheer magnitude of their political activism, the Latter-day Saints paid a fine of just over $5,000 to California’s Fair Political Practices Commission.
Money itself, especially the importance of “gay economic might,” also takes center stage in Issenberg’s book. “A galaxy of covert donors orbiting around Denver software millionaire Tim Gill remade the gay-rights movement in their own image,” he writes, “ideologically conservative and strategically radical.” Gay marriage activists, modeling themselves on corporate PACs, successfully transformed into a lobbying force one likened to a “Gay Pfizer,” using the carrot of political contributions and the stick of funding one’s opponents. The strategy worked: In 2011, three Democrats in the New York Legislature reversed their earlier positions on gay marriage after witnessing gay organizations’ ability to end political careers. In 2012, after President Obama announced his support of gay marriage, according to one campaign staffer, “You could literally hear the gay money pouring in.”
Through Issenberg’s illumination of the donors, activists and attorneys on both sides of the saga, another aspect of the battle for marriage equality becomes starkly clear: its whiteness. Obama plays an important role, certainly, but nearly all of the individuals at the core of the narrative — dozens of them — are white. Issenberg doesn’t shy away from examining the role of race in electoral politics (the loss of the Black vote against Proposition 8, he concludes, was merely the symptom of a more widespread messaging problem), but we don’t learn why, exactly, queer Black activists were such a rarity in the upper echelons of the marriage fight.
They have long told us the reasons: In addition to broader racism and transphobia within the mainstream gay rights movement, marriage was always primarily a white, cisgender issue. “Gay marriage? Please,” wrote Jasmyne Cannick, a Los Angeles-based political strategist and journalist, after the passage of Proposition 8. “The white gay community is banging its head against the glass ceiling of a room called equality, believing that a breakthrough on marriage will bestow on it parity with heterosexuals. But the right to marry does nothing to address the problems faced by both Black gays and Black straights. Does someone who is homeless or suffering from H.I.V. but has no health care, or newly out of prison and unemployed, really benefit from the right to marry someone of the same sex?”
As Issenberg points out, some lesbian feminists like the lawyer and activist Paula Ettelbrick offered early alternatives to marriage, including “making room in our society for broader definitions of family.” In the midst of the post-Baehr conservative backlash, however, detractors found themselves in what Ettelbrick called the “very odd” position of defending marriage against the religious right, thereby tacitly embracing the cause. But despite Issenberg’s nuanced coverage of other intra-movement squabbles, “The Engagement” bypasses several vital critiques of marriage; any book that covers Sullivan’s “Virtually Normal” should also present the arguments of Urvashi Vaid’s “Virtual Equality” (her book is cited briefly), Michael Warner’s “The Trouble With Normal” and Martha Fineman’s “The Neutered Mother, the Sexual Family, and Other Twentieth-Century Tragedies,” to name a few.
In his postscript, Issenberg recognizes that the fight for gay marriage left much of the L.G.B.T.Q. community behind. “Transgendered Americans were certainly no better off than they had been,” he writes. This admission raises the question: What was lost in spending untold millions of dollars on same-sex marriage instead of a more expansive form of queer liberation? Given that queer and trans people of color had been offering alternative visions of freedom since the beginning of L.G.B.T.Q. organizing, what if we had instead focused on the most marginalized members of our community, those who put their bodies on the line at the Stonewall riots of 1969? What if, before pursuing marriage, we had first provided housing to American youth experiencing homelessness, up to 40 percent of whom identify as queer? If we had funneled our resources to protect and elevate Black trans women, who are now facing an epidemic of violence?
In the era of de-Trumpification, the L.G.B.T.Q. community has the opportunity to consider what it can and must accomplish now that marriage equality has granted tax and social privileges only to those able and willing to join that institution. Meanwhile, Issenberg leaves us with a valuable lesson: We must pick our battles wisely, for they dictate not just our rights, but also the limits of our political imagination.
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