The Freedom to Marry

As Evan Wolfson* and others write and talk and take action as part of National Freedom to Marry Week, I wanted to take a step back this Valentine’s Day to assess where the movement for marriage equality is today.

I came out to my mother over Thanksgiving in 1995, and I knew that my life was forever changed by turning that idea into reality by telling mom.  I was 18, and I began dating my first boyfriend.  It was an exciting time of firsts, yet I knew that one of the most prominent of changes was the somewhat absurd fact that by admitting to the public that I loved a man, I had joined the “gay movement.”

Today, for young people coming out, that hasn’t necessarily been the case.  But, publicly dating a man, even in the socially liberal Washington, D.C., was still a political act in 1995.  Ten years earlier, in 1985, being gay—in the anti-gay, anti-AIDS-hysteria surrounding that time—was all the more political an act.  Ten years before that, in 1975, coming out was an guarantee of discrimination that often led to government-sanctioned assault.  It was, then, an irrefutably political act.

From my time as a political intern for the Human Rights Campaign in 1998 to my time researching and writing about LGBT issues in law school, I have watched as our movement has lost legislative and ballot battles across the country on “the marriage question.”  I watched as we, rarely, won court battles for, first, civil unions, and then, slowly but surely, marriage.  I watched as we began winning some legislative battles over equal benefits for lesbian and gay couples in states on either coast.  I watched as the contradictory waves of 2004, in Massachusetts and San Francisco versus everywhere else, settled into the calm that preceded the 2008 election.

The past four years, though, appeared to have been a calm time, a time in which nothing particularly remarkable was happening.  That, it will be seen in retrospect, was not at all correct.

During those four years, marriage equality was becoming reality.  Thanks to the work done in Massachusetts, four years of citizens—specifically, new voters—came of age with same-sex couples being a part of the “legitimate” American family.  Current voters saw it, too.  Some hated it, some were disgusted by it, but everyone saw it.  The tedious distinctions drawn by courts and legislatures in states like New York, New Jersey and Washington made young people wonder why the distinctions were needed.  Longtime marriage equality advocates like Andrew Sullivan, Evan Wolfson and Mary Bonuato answered that those distinctions would not stand the test of time.

Then, as the country celebrated the destruction of the racial prerequisite for the presidency, lesbian and gay Americans awoke—so similarly to 2004—to the news that California voters appeared to have voted for Proposition 8, a constitutional amendment that eliminated the right of same-sex couples in the state to marry.

What has followed since, as Americans have seen, is an outpouring of opposition—nationally, not only in California—to the proposition’s passage.  With rallies and protests Facebooked and Flickred and Twittered, questions have been raised: Where were these people before the vote?  Why weren’t they knocking on doors and raising money and raising their voices before the measure passed?

Many answers to those questions have been offered, but there’s one that I’ve not yet seen discussed—one that I think it hits at the heart of what has changed since I came out.  Until she woke up on November 5, 2008, a lesbian who came out in the past few years wasn’t necessarily made a part of the movement for lesbian and gay equality because she, among her peers, does not live in a world in which such a movement is needed.  It wasn’t until a young gay man saw that, outside of his Facebook college network, there were significant numbers of people—a majority of voters even in “ultra-liberal” California—who opposed his right to marry that he was called to join the movement.

Why weren’t they there before the vote?  Quite simply, nothing had happened to make them realize that they were needed.

Now, however, the voice being raised is far more powerful than it might otherwise have been.  It is that of surprised, righteous indignation from young lesbian, gay and bisexual people.  It is that of their straight friends and family, who—just like their lesbian, gay and bisexual family members, classmates and co-workers—have taken a personal affront to the fact that marriage equality would be denied anyone.  It is even that of more conservative voices—from California Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman to Utah Governor Jon Huntsman, Jr.—beginning to see and discuss openly the fundamental problems with denying equality to same-sex couples.  (Even though they still have a ways to go, the sea-change is evident.)

Now, all at once, several years of potential LGBT activists—and their friends and colleagues—have been forced to face the reality of discrimination.  They are taking action, and they will make a difference.  Holding hands with their loved one was not, until November 5, a step they saw as political.  It was just being.  Now, however, the vote on Proposition 8 has activated their activism, and we are better for it.

This year, National Freedom to Marry Week seems to me—for the first time—to be a truly nationalized issue on the pro-equality side.  If 2004 was the year of success for the nationalization of the anti-equality forces, this year is the beginning of a coalescing of the pro-equality forces toward the opposing—and moral—principle.

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* = Only someone with such a dedicated, long vision for success like Evan could write something like this:

In the wake of last November’s Proposition 8 temporarily halting marriages in California, and with marriage equality shimmering within reach in other states such as New York and New Jersey, gay and non-gay people and organizations across the country will spend Freedom to Marry Week asking our fellow citizens to, in Lincoln’s words, “think anew” about how exclusion from marriage harms gay families while helping no one. Freedom to Marry Week in this Lincoln bicentennial year recalls his admonition, “Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.”

Temporarily halting.  He understands the fight to its core and knows that progress is sometimes achieved in defeat.

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