Luke Hass on Prop-8
Typically, when we talk about silver linings, we mean small, ancillary benefits that are overshadowed by the cloud itself. For example, I might write, “I got dumped this weekend, but the silver lining is I saved $751 on a plane ticket to Chile, $340 for a hotel room, $50 for roses, and my pride.” But I digress. Yesterday’s Proposition 8 ruling by the California Supreme Court is a bitter disappointment to thousands of Californians and their friends across the country. But this is the rare case where gay rights supporters may look back and discover that the silver lining meaningfully outshines the gray. Why? The fight over marriage equality is radically altering how many Americans think of gay and lesbian people. It has, in effect, rebranded what it means to be gay. Over twenty years ago, legal pioneers like Evan Wolfson began the fight for equal rights for gay and lesbian Americans in the courts. At the time, the general public defined gay and lesbian identity in terms of sex and certain, rather specific, sex acts. They had vivid images of these acts (many, at the time, illegal), and created related, profane phrases to describe and categorize gay people purely in terms of sex. When, in the mid-1990s, Wolfson pushed for equal marriage rights, many in the gay community were worried that he was overreaching. They encouraged leaders in the community to wait and focus on gains like employment and housing non-discrimination. A decade later, when the Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders filed the case that established legal same sex marriage for the first time in the United States, in Massachusetts, the same fears persisted. What Wolfson and GLAD may have known, but has not been commonly understood, was that the marriage fight itself would bring great benefit to the gay community. The fight over equal marriage has redefined gay and lesbian identity in terms of love. And this redefinition has made gay and lesbian people more acceptable to the general public and equal rights easier to win and protect. During the 1996-1999 Hawaii marriage fight and the subsequent state-by-state battles that followed, images of committed gay couples and loving gay families have filled the media. Each time that the battle is joined, same-sex couples that have been together for decades are shown holding hands and asking for the right to marry. These are not the sexual deviants depicted in profane phrases twenty years ago. We see images of two forty year-old women, watching their children play with the family dog in a front yard. We see two elderly men, describing their half-century together. We witness in their stories the same joys and same challenges that any family might face. And we hear them in the context of gay and lesbian people seeking recognition of their love. Today, tens of millions of Americans will hear that the court upheld Proposition 8 and learn that it’s a setback for gay marriage in America. But this same setback may well be part of a much bigger step forward for gay rights in America. Those same tens of millions will see images of gay and lesbian people in loving relationships. They will hear their stories. They will have images of loving couples and their families imprinted in their minds, filed as the new definition of "gay." And while it may have been easy to hate someone because of how they had sex (twenty years ago), it’s a lot harder to hate them because of whom they love. Abraham Lincoln once said "Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves." It doesn't matter what the generation before you told you the Bible said (even though it doesn't), and it is not true that denying rights to a group of people based on the way they were born will somehow change them. When the issue of marriage equality arises in your state, do the right thing and support love, not hate.
0%
