Thursday, May 15, 2008 - Posts
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About a year ago, I was visiting friends in Los Angeles. They had a small dinner party in my honor. All of us were lesbians, all relatively political. One couple had been together nearly 30 years, since they met in law school; another couple was raising school-age kids; I was the "gay divorcee," having just separated from my partner after 19 years (much as happened to my parents' marriage after 20 years. Is the 20-year divorce caused by nature or nurture? Discuss).
Naturally, the conversation turned toward the Californians' frustrations that Gov. Arnold kept vetoing the California legislature's freedom-to-marry law ... and their frustrations that their progressive nongay friends dismissed their concern with the issue. After all, their nongay friends told them, registered domestic partnership protected them (California's domestic partnership is equivalent to Vermont's civil unions): Wasn't that enough? Nope. There are legal differences. But even if there weren't, as one friend of mine loves to say, you get to your destination whether you sit in the front or the back of the bus ... and yet it's still an indignity to be forced to sit in the back. I mocked my friends mildly that California was trailing so far behind my state of Massachusetts, and I promised to come to their weddings when they won.
Hearing frustrations that we had almost forgotten in Massachusetts, it struck me how very deeply the Massachusetts marriage decision had sunk into my psyche. I really have stopped feeling 'queer' here. Nobody around here blinks an eye when I talk about the confusions of dating (or not dating, as the case may be: now accepting applicants!) after two decades of marriage. Here in the Boston area, same-sex couples hold each others' hands in public or kiss goodby at the airport without anyone glancing at them: After all, they could be married. Two women or two men who look like they are together get treated openly as a couple—at restaurants or shops—in a way that feels simply honest and dignified. It's a complete transformation from my youth, when the possibility of violence always simmered nearby, when shocking comments could flow at any minute. Another friend says that listening to me is like listening to her older black friends describe living through the end of Jim Crow. Yes, there's still antigay sentiment here in Massachusetts, but it makes an enormous difference when a couple's vows to each other are recognized not just by the pair, not just by their families, but also by our government.
And it's hard to convey how very proud so many Massachusetts citizens are of having gone first. I've had state legislators tell me, in their deeply-stained Massachusetts accents, that they were opposed to gender-neutralizing marriage at first—but once they started hearing from their newly married constituents, they knew they had to vote in favor of upholding the Goodridge decision. They did vote on our side. Those who voted against full marriage rights lost their seats.
California's legislators have already voted twice in favor of full marriage rights for all; the Governator vetoed it, tossing the issue to the courts. Now the issue will be voted on popular referendum this fall. No state's popular vote has yet favored full, gender-neutral marriage. Although California's opinion trends are in the right direction, the state has an enormous conservative population. (It's the state where a 14-year-old killed his classmate for being openly gay.) This vote will be a big test. The good news is that California activists have been preparing for this matchup ever since they lost their first marriage ballot in 2000, in the proposition that the CSC just struck down, with widespread education. If any state can do defeat this bill, it's the Golden State.
I won't be flying out for any California weddings this week; my friends will wait until they've really & truly won. But I lift my coffee mug for the state's 100,000 registered domestic partners and their children—who are full citizens, for now. May the very large country of California, with its population of 36 million, be as peacefully and easily transformed as the tinier, chillier state of Massachusetts!
AND NOW a question for Dahlia: Am I reading the decision correctly? Did the California Supremes just say that sexual orientation is a fully "suspect class," equivalent to race, sex, and religion—that discrimination against LGBT folks gets, as you lawyers say, strict scrutiny? And is that as big a deal as it strikes me?
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Welcome, Kim, and I’m glad you brought up Alice Walker's “womanist” position. Her Root essay last March, “Lest We Forget: An Open Letter to My Sisters Who Are Brave,” endorsing Barack Obama stayed with me a long time. Not just because I found Walker’s trademarked word womanism to describe only “feminist women of color” a little exclusionary.
I do agree that Hillary Clinton is not, as Walker reminds us, "colorless, race-less, past-less," and she escapes racial scrutiny as "a woman" while Barack Obama is always "a black man." Furthermore, playing the race card (whether she then withdrew it or not) was inexcusable. But, although it is true that Hillary has benefited, as have I and other white women (particularly of our generation) from innumerable educational and economic advantages to being Caucasian in this country, I got a little uncomfortable when Walker wrote that Clinton carries "all the history of white womanhood in America in her person." Perhaps wrongly, until reading that, I had not personally considered myself an exploiter of racial inequality. To be clear, I am deeply ashamed of the abomination of slavery and the century of discrimination that followed. I just didn't think simply by being white and of a certain age, I was part of the problem.
I saw Florida recently joined the queue of states that have apologized for slavery. I posted a "Hot Document" a few months ago when New Jersey did the same thing. A lot of Slate readers Frayed for weeks declaiming the emptiness of that state’s gesture while many others wrote angrily that the official apology wasted resources and was not owed by the geographical descendants of New Jersey’s 19th-century citizens. Personally, I think it’s never too late to apologize. In fact, I now want to apologize to Alice Walker on behalf of myself and all white women who believe in equality. Really. Can we be womanists now too?
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Rachael, I could not agree more. Hillary Clinton is far too smart a cookie (oops, is that sexist?) for me to believe her comments were but a sad, sad slip of the tongue. She knew exactly which signal flag she was waving toward the hills of West Virginia. Let's give credit where credit is due.
Hillary aside, though, what I've been wondering about more and more during this endless primary season is whether the damage done to black women/white women relationships will be permanent or not. That there has been damage to this ever-fragile sisterhood is clear to me, both in reading the millions of words flooding the Internet about this subject and in my own personal life. Problems seem to arise not when friends discover they stand on different sides of the Hillary/Barack divide, but when they discover that the very prisms through which they view this contest, and thus the relative importance of race and gender in this society, are—surprise, surprise—miles apart. More critically, the damage is deepened when one party insists that in failing to share her view, the other party is somehow less enlightened.
Just the other day I had a very awkward conversation with a white woman acquaintance who recalled aloud that infamous Gloria Steinem piece in the New York Times way back when. She recalled the article as refreshing and necessary and brave. I remembered it as the first rock tossed in what would become a battle of who-has-it-harder. Most of all, I remembered reading Steinem's line that gender was the most restricting force in America today and laughing aloud, because I was so sure that what she meant to say was that gender is the most restricting force in America today—if you happen to be white and middle-class. Having spent some time that week at a Boston public school that is visibly and painfully segregated—segregated and restricted by race and economic status and parental educational attainment and maybe some other things but certainly not by gender—and having looked up a number of statistics on the economic status of white women versus black men, including, by the way, the number of white women currently in the U.S. Senate (16) compared with the number of African-Americans (um, that would be one), found her view utterly unsupportable. My friend suggested that I was wrong. I said we might have to agree to disagree; she insisted that sexism and misogyny remain a more potent force than racism not only in America, but in my own life if I just had the good sense to realize it. And we were off on that ridiculous hamster wheel again. She quoted poor Barbara Jordan, who has been trotted out so endlessly this year by people who want to disavow the impact of race on a black woman's life that she must be begging to be allowed to rest in peace. I quoted Alice Walker, who famously wrote that womanist (feminist of color) is to feminist as lavender is to purple. In other words, our struggles are not the same. For a while there we seemed to be working together, though. Is that all over now?
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Emily, Hillary can be called a lot of things, but dumb is not one of them. So I don't buy for a second that she thinks that her comments about white working-class voters was the "dumbest thing she ever said." (Especially considering the other worthy candidates for that honor, like the Bosnia sniper-fire kerfuffle.)
Let's look at how this played out. Hillary claimed that "Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again," hinting that he appealed only to highfalutin liberals in blue states. She was going to win blue-collar West Virginia anyhow, but did anyone expect that she'd win by 40 points? And just how did she win by that much? I can't put it any better than Jon Stewart and his bottle of Jack Daniels:
Now that she can take those results to neighboring Kentucky, what with its similar demographics, it's easy to cop that her original comments were in poor taste. They've served their purpose.
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