Friday, June 26, 2015

Thoughts on Marriage Equality Victory!

Holy shit!
"The Fourteenth Amendment requires a State to license a mar- riage between two people of the same sex and to recognize a marriage between two people of the same sex when their marriage was lawful- ly licensed and performed out-of-State." (Full decision, here, in PDF)
When I started Fannie's Room about 8 years ago, I more frequently wrote about marriage equality, regularly interacting with and, yes, battling it out with opponents of equality here and elsewhere on Internet. I sometimes wonder what various cast of characters are up to these days, as I've seen many anti-LGBT blogs come and go during this time: the various Digital Network Army blog group that was supposedly a "grassroots" blogging network dedicated to opposing marriage equality; the hateful little Opine Editorials; the Family Scholars Blog, where I used to guest blog until David Blankenhorn stopped opposing equality and the blog was later shut down.

Today feels good.

In 2008, when Proposition 8 eliminated the right for same-sex couples to marry in California, it felt devastating.  Likewise, I remember the couple dozen or so states that passed constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage between 2000 and 2008, most of which had implicit or explicit support from, at the time, President George W. Bush.

I'm grateful for the sway in public opinion, and for the efforts of so many allies and advocates, that has occurred just in my lifetime.  In many ways, I think one of the great successes of the movement was to demonstrate the humanity of gay men and lesbians, work that is not as advanced and must continue for bisexual and trans people.

In my opinion, the anti-gay movement's great failing has been, actually, their insistence on acting like bigots while manufacturing outrage at being called bigots - a tactic that exposed them as both hateful and not credible narrators of reality.

I know there is still so much social justice work to be done, but today - hell, maybe all weekend! - I'm just going to be happy.

Oh yeah, and I'm once again feeling some big-time schadenfreude that the discredited Regnerus study on parenting did not sway the biggest court decisions on marriage, even though public records show it was released precisely to do so.

Anyway, anybody getting hitched?

No comments: