자유게시판

title_Free
뉴욕타임즈 2013-06-30 02:02:19
+0 1214

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/27/opinion/the-long-road-to-marriage-equality.html


The Long Road to Marriage Equality

NEW HAVEN — THE Supreme Court’s soaring decision to strike down the core of the Defense of Marriage Act as unconstitutional is a civil rights landmark, but the history leading up to it is poorly understood. Marriage equality was neither inevitable nor, until recently, even conceivable. And the struggle for it was not, as is commonly believed, a natural consequence of the gay liberation movement that gained steam in the late 1960s.

It was not until the 1980s that securing legal recognition for same-sex relationships became an urgent concern of lesbians and gay men. Decades earlier, such recognition was almost unimaginable. In the 1950s, most states criminalized gay people’s sexual intimacy. Newspaper headlines blared the State Department’s purge of homosexual employees during the McCarthy-era “lavender scare.” Police cracked down on lesbian and gay bars and other alleged “breeding grounds” of homosexuality.

The lesbian and gay liberation movements of the early 1970s did not make marriage a priority — quite the opposite. Activists fought police raids, job discrimination and families’ rejection of their queer children. Most radical activists scorned the very idea of marriage. But a handful walked into clerks’ offices across the country to request marriage licenses. State officials suddenly realized that their laws failed to limit marriage to a man and a woman; no other arrangement had been imagined. By 1978, 15 states had written this limitation into law.

A “traditional family values” movement arose to oppose gay rights and feminism. Anita Bryant and other activists took aim at some of the earliest local anti-discrimination laws, and by 1979 they had persuaded voters in several cities to repeal them. Subsequently, in more than 100 state and local referendums, gay-rights activists had to defend hard-won protections. This, not marriage, consumed much of their energy.

It was the ’80s that changed things. The AIDS epidemic and what came to be known as the “lesbian baby boom” compelled even those couples whose friends and family fully embraced them to deal with powerful institutions — family and probate courts, hospitals, adoption agencies and funeral homes — that treated them as legal strangers.

Hospitals could deny the gay partner of someone with AIDS visitation privileges, not to mention consultation over treatment. He couldn’t use his health insurance to cover his partner. He risked losing his home after his partner died, if his name wasn’t on the lease or if he couldn’t pay inheritance taxes on his partner’s share (which would not have been required of a surviving spouse).

When two women shared parenting and the biological mother died, the courts often felt obliged to grant custody to her legal next of kin — even if the child wished to remain with the nonbiological mother. If the women separated, the biological mother could unilaterally deny her ex the right to see their children.

Couples used wills, powers of attorney and innovative new legal arrangements like domestic partnerships and second-parent adoption to try to get around these injustices, an astounding achievement given the reigning conservatism of the ’80s and early ’90s. But for all their virtues, none of these arrangements could provide the Social Security, tax, immigration and other benefits that only marriage could bestow.

The marriage movement emerged out of this maelstrom, but it was always about more than legal benefits. Historically, denial of marriage rights has been a powerful symbol of people’s exclusion from full citizenship. Enslaved people in America did not have the right to marry before the Civil War; Jews did not have the right to marry non-Jews in Nazi Germany. In 1948, the United Nations enshrined the freedom to marry as a fundamental human right. That same year California’s highest court became the first in the nation to overturn a state law banning interracial marriage.

As attitudes toward homosexuality changed in the 1990s, before accelerating ever more rapidly over the last decade, antigay activists — who had already fought gay teachers in schools, gay-student groups, gay characters on TV, domestic partnerships and anti-discrimination laws — redoubled their fight against marriage equality. In 1996, when it appeared that Hawaii’s courts might let same-sex couples wed, Congress passed DOMA, which declared that no state needed to give “full faith and credit” to another state’s same-sex marriages. It also denied federal recognition and benefits to such marriages — the provision struck down on Wednesday. As Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority: “DOMA’s principal effect is to identify a subset of state-sanctioned marriages and make them unequal.”

When Massachusetts became the first state to let gay couples marry, in 2004, it unleashed opposition as well as euphoria. That year, 13 states amended their constitutions to ban such marriages (12 had already done so legislatively). Ultimately, California and 40 other states acted to limit marriage to one man and one woman by constitutional amendment, legislation or both; in 30 states, the amendments are on the books. As a result of another Supreme Court ruling on Wednesday, California will soon join 12 states (and the District of Columbia) in permitting same-sex marriage, but the state-by-state battle will grind on elsewhere.

The intensity of the backlash against marriage equality eventually produced its own backlash. Many heterosexuals sought to distance themselves from the antigay animus it expressed. Young people, who grew up in a cultural universe different from their parents’, began to wonder why marriage was an issue at all. Political figures as different as Barack Obama and Rob Portman described how their children had affected their thinking.

Federal benefits will dramatically improve the lives of countless people, from the lesbian widow who needs her wife’s Social Security benefits to hold onto her home to the gay New Yorker whose foreign husband will now be able to live with him in America. Couples will no longer suffer the indignity of having the government treat their marriages as inferior.

Urgent problems still confront lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, including the endemic bullying of queer students, discrimination in housing and employment and the surge in new H.I.V. infections among young gay and bisexual men. Marriage equality has singular legal, cultural and practical significance. Nonetheless, it was not the first issue to animate the struggle for equality and dignity — nor will it be the last.

George Chauncey, a professor of history and American studies at Yale, was an expert witness in both of the same-sex marriage cases decided Wednesday.

번호 제목 작성자 날짜 조회 수
11184 이요나 목사 '동성애 중독 치유 사역' 축소·중단... +9 계덕이 2013-07-09 2360
11183 나를 잊었나요? +2 낙타 2013-07-09 1438
11182 지웨이 프로젝트 9일(화) 모입니당..^^ 종순이 2013-07-08 1127
11181 마지막 워크샵 사진 발송~~ +3 차돌바우 2013-07-08 1001
11180 워크샵 사진 신청 이번주 마감입니다! +2 차돌바우 2013-07-05 983
11179 게이 부모의 아이들이 일반 부모들의 아이와 동등... 아라미스 2013-07-04 1298
11178 가족 패러다임의 변화와 동성결합의 의미 (가족구... +1 종순이 2013-07-04 1639
11177 성북구, 주민참여예산사업에 '성소수자 무지개 상... +2 계덕이 2013-07-04 1407
11176 텀블벅 후원 어떻게 하는지 모르시겠다구요? 이 ... +1 낙타 2013-07-03 1806
11175 지_보이스 텀블벅 후원 페이지가 오픈되었습니다! +6 낙타 2013-07-03 1342
11174 [이반스쿨] 청소년 성소수자 차별감시단 QSI 두번... 낙타 2013-07-02 1637
11173 국민 10명중 6명은 차별금지법 제정 찬성 계덕이 2013-07-02 1018
11172 성소수자 가족모임 자원활동가 교육모임 +3 박재경 2013-07-02 918
11171 페이스북·구글·애플 임직원 수천명 게이퍼레이드 ... +1 계덕이 2013-07-01 1134
11170 지난 토요일 어느 게이커플의 결혼식에 다녀왔어요. +11 2013-07-01 1547
11169 이태원 '열린문공동체'의 게이 목사님 기사. +3 코러스보이 2013-07-01 2511
11168 역시 사람이 와야 집을 치우는 법...! ㅋ +12 damaged..? 2013-06-30 1153
11167 7월 책읽당 - 인권감수성 UP! [수신확인, 차별이 ... +1 라떼 2013-06-30 1669
11166 구글 어플중 '게이치료' 어플 제거 서명운동.. +1 아라미스 2013-06-30 1797
» The Long Road to Marriage Equality 뉴욕타임즈 2013-06-30 1214
마음연결
마음연결 프로젝트는 한국게이인권운동단체 친구사이에서 2014년부터 진행하고 있는 성소수자 자살예방 프로젝트입니다.