One marriage-equality crusader tired of liberals’ ain’t-it-awful chant joined us today on Left Ahead. The Rev. John Buehrens was the first straight on Freedom to Marry‘s board and has served on it for nine years. He is relentlessly optimistic about per-state and nationwide equality.
While a minister, he is a UU and former president of the UUA. He doesn’t come from smiley-face religiosity. His is a social-action bunch.
I heard him at his Needham church less than two months ago recapping his FTM times. He spoke of how pleased and surprised they have been that the drive for equality has spread so rapidly among states. Perhaps more important, national support for equality has grown even faster, to a slight majority in favor, with quite a few undecided now.
Then he also spoke of low-hanging fruit, including Maryland. I thought he was a bit daft considering how that legislature had recently rejected marriage equality. Of course, he was right as we all know now.
That state faces the dreadful referendum/ballot initiative challenge, the resort of the anti-equality and anti-gay forces after they lose in courts or the legislature. Click below to hear how he sees the five states in play for this year’s elections, including Maryland.
Buehrens describes what he sees as a tipping point for this crucial civil-rights issue. In addition to more public support, there is more state-level legislative backing. He sees a nation with 10 marriage-equality states and another 10 all-but-marriage ones. When that happens, things will also fall in place at a national level, he figures. That would include overturning the Defense of Marriage Act.
Click below for the 41-minute show. It includes his evaluation of the GOP losing its monolithic opposition to equality and the Dems almost certainly including a pro-equality plank in this June’s platform for the convention.
listen in
Alabama and Mississippi. Not surprising I’m sure, but I bring this up because PPP did a poll of those states’ Republicans and found a significant number still questioning the wisdom of permitting interracial marriage. Between that and only 12-14% believing that the President is Christian while 45-52% say he is Muslim it’s hard not to write this block off as completely hopeless.
… how much we’ve lost strategically be conceding that the terrain of engagement is to be at the state level.
Well, the pro-equality folk seem to have gotten over the terror of any federal court decisions. Coupled with the slim majority favoring marriage equality, it looks more like the forces of civil rights won’t have to wait for the WWII and Boomer generations to go away.
… by defining the battlefield at the state level, we’ve conceded the universality of the principal. We’re all equal, but your mileage may vary from state to state is an inherent contradiction. It’s a contradiction that leaving things to the states conveniently allows the right to avoid confronting because it enables a given resolution to err on the side of state-defined equality.
I contend that this needs to be resolved through federal direction on comity. That is well established, actually from Colonial times for many colonies/states here. Contracts and portable laws and regulations, like diving licenses, are honored across state lines. Make it so, Number 1.
I’m suspect SCUBA certification is as well, but that’s not what I was about.
licenses.
(Where’s the old Edit button?)
We haven’t.
The Prop 8 lawsuit, and the Massachusetts DOMA lawsuit, both are challenging the bigots at the national level… and both have been doing well in the courts thus far.
… EJ Graff book.
http://books.google.com/books/about/What_is_marriage_for.html?id=hEBkjv4CkmgC
I just learned today that a high school friend who I thought had died of heat stroke (which is what the family said officially) from basketball practice had actually hung himself since he was Haitian, Baptist, and gay and could no longer live with reconciling those facets of his identity. It is becoming incredibly obvious to me in my own conversations with gay friends and hearing gut wrenching stories like this that homosexuality is just another part of someones identity just like race, religion, or being blue eyed. It is something that should never prevent someone from fully participating as a citizen in this country, and I have always supported marriage equality because of that.
But the symbolism of equality, the insistence by some in the LGBT community for cultural acceptance as well as civil equality, which I used to view as a practical obstacle to the fight for equality, seems essential to it now. Its not just about breaking down civil barriers, it is about changing the culture. From the Rutgers student to my own classmate and acquaintance who was as brilliant on the stage or in the chem lab as he was on the basketball court, every gay American should feel loved and accepted, especially by their family and community, being equal under the law should no longer be viewed as an acceptable benchmark. I am confident that we will have 50 state marriage equality in my lifetime, possibly a lot sooner than we appreciate, but over the long term only full cultural acceptance can prevent tragedies like those at Rutgers and the one my classmate suffered.
Your best, IMO.
Cultural acceptance is critical and while we can’t legally enforce that, it has to be a part of the mission.
I’m at a cafe right now in Salem and almost tweeted a few minutes ago about an intimate moment a couple shared opposite me with a romantic kiss and hug.
No one batted an eye, but of course they were straight.
If they were gay, I have no doubt even in liberal Massachusetts — the “Las Vegas of gay marriage” as Mitt Romney likes to call us — people would have turned the corner of their eyes and stared for a bit, and been annoyed that they were ‘shoving their gayness in their face,’ as if they were making a political statement, instead of being themselves.
In other parts of the country, they may have even been kicked out of the cafe or beaten up, were they gay.
Then there’s also the huge issue of bullying, which IMO is the real cause of many glbt suicides with teenagers. Many of the kids who commit suicide after homophobic ridicule aren’t even gay, they’re just called that to diminish them in front of their peers… and because we don’t have that broad cultural acceptance in many parts of the country, it works.
Homophobia seems to be at the center of bullying, at least when it comes to males, and there’s some solid evidence that if you end homophobia in a school… bullying tends to go with it.
In that way, you get an environment where kids are, shocker of shockers, nice to each other, inclusive and not afraid to be affectionate or show themselves as something less than macho. I would love to live in a society where people grow like that, because it would be a better society, with better people and better able to meet the challenges of today.
“Cultural acceptance is critical and while we can’t legally enforce that”
Anti-bullying statutes certainly help culturally telegraph that bigotry isn’t ok.
We can ban hate crimes, harrassment, bullying, make it so people can’t be fired or denied housing because of their sexual orientation and all sorts of other stuff.
But we can’t legally enforce people to be nice to each other, accepting and tolerant. That takes time, education and exposure.
… but we telegraph our values with our laws.
Exposure probably trumps everything with regard to what is effective, but the law doesn’t just punish – it frames the issue.
But I can do my best impression of a certain other character we know, who usually sits to my right, and continue :p
And to clarify I’m from Cambridge, MA and my school had the first Gay Straight alliance on the East Coast which was very active and successful in combating homophobia, and my classmate still did that to himself. It will be difficult to end homophobia in the home until we strengthen our laws and more importantly start setting the cultural markers. Schools are the best place to diffuse that and there is wide latitude for administrators to censor bigoted speech and create safe environments. We may be closer to gay marriage, but we are little over ten years removed from Matthew Shepherd, only a year removed from the Rutgers student, and eight years removed from a gay teacher being kicked out of a public school right in Massachusetts. Schools should be little laboratories of democracy where free speech and democratic citizenship is imparted, but they must be safe environments first for all kids and indoctrination that encourages love and acceptance of all people is indoctrination I’m comfortable with enforcing.