The XX Factor: What women really think.

Maine Voters Rejected Gay Marriage

When the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts legalized same-sex marriage in 2003, the polls showed disapproval by a margin of 53 percent to 35 percent. After the ruling went into effect, legislators geared up to reverse it by amending the state constitution. But two years later, the poll numbers had flipped, and the backlash never came. That's because reversing the court's ruling was a long process, not a quick and hasty ballot initiative like the one that Maine passed in Tuesday's election. In Maine, the law passed last May and never even went into effect ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).

Did Obama Announce the SCOTUS Nominee to Distract Us from Prop 8?

Equal Marriage Comes to Maine—All by Vote, No Judges Involved

I just got a note from GLAD saying that Maine's Governor Balducci has signed into law a bill that gender-neutralizes marriage, initiated and passed by Maine's legislature without any court case or judicial involvement whatsoever. That makes Maine the first equal-marriage state to do so entirely on its elected officials' own initiative.

I'm a lumberjack and I'm okay, indeed. A friend from Maine says the Gov. is very close to his out lesbian sister; she expected the signing to come quickly. It's just hard to tell someone you've known and loved and fought with from birth that you don't think she should have the same rights and responsibilities that you do. Maine has a very active referendum process, so it will go up for a statewide vote soon. Go Mainiacs! Marry early, marry often, and hang on to those licenses!

Goodness, fairness is breaking out all over. I thought June was the marriage month! Perhaps judges and legislators in Iowa, Vermont, and Maine thought it might be nice to give same-sex couples and their families a chance to plan before they set those bells ringing?

Next in queue: New Hampshire, New Jersey, and New York.  And I'm told we should expect a California rematch next year. Now that no state has to worry about being vilified for going first (Massachusetts), second (Connecticut), third (Iowa) or even fourth (Vermont), maybe equality seems like a no-brainer?

I don't know when it takes effect.

Those Bells Are Ringing

Bonnie, FAB idea about Justice Mikulski! I hope you have POTUS's ear on this. Or at least FLOTUS?

In unrelated news, this week the Senates of both New Hampshire and Maine passed bills to gender-neutralize their states' marriage laws. NH's Senate bill now has to be reconciled with its House bill (also passed); no one's sure whether the governor will sign, veto, or leave it alone to become law. Maine's hasn't gone to the House yet; that state also has a nastier referendum process, which could make it harder to keep a marriage law even if passed.

Why is the Granite State getting behind same-sex marriage? Well, there are a lot of possible reasons. It's watched its neighbors (Vermont, Canada, Massachusetts, and a little farther to the south, Connecticut) open marriage to same-sex couples, with yawn-worthy results: no locusts, plagues, or hurricanes. New England LGBT advocacy groups, especially GLAD, have been extremely savvy about working toward equality throughout the region, with a slogan of "6 x 12": equal marriage in all six New England states by 2012, a goal that's looking quite realistic. And, of course, the air is just a little clearer up here than in the more humid parts of the country. (Okay, maybe that was unnecessary...).

Renee Loth, editorial page editor at the Boston Globe, has yet another idea: It's because of women. New Hampshire's legislature is now majority female. And women are more socially liberal on family-related issues in general—including such issues as early childhood education and gay rights. You go, girls!

Yet another reason for at least two female Supremes? I guess this post is related to the potential nomination of Justice Mikulski after all.

Mouthiness and Marriage

Teens, schools, sex, lies, and sex

Well, Jess, my tongue was firmly in my cheek when I wondered whether it was healthy for anyone if adolescents lived with their parents. I guess I need to either improve my written tonal control (is there a personal trainer for that?) or learn to use emoticons.

But I was thinking of precisely such parental traumas as The Sex Talk. Meghan, I love how your mother spoke to you! Very early on, my mother told me (this would have been, oh, 1973?) that If People Needed Planned Parenthood, It Was A Good Thing To Go There. I had no idea what she was talking about yet. She was clearly uncomfortable. Then she took me to her gynecologist, a very stern woman who gave me The Contraception Talk. By the time I was in college—and I got out of high school like a bat out of hell, at age 16—my dad implied jokingly that I must be getting plenty of exercise in bed, and told me flat out that he assumed I was using contraception.

It was the anti-virginity era, and what I wish is that someone had said to me: if you never have sex with a boy, that would be just fine. Later I learned that they all suspected that I was heading toward the land of Sappho: my parents, my little brothers, and probably passersby as well. So parents, here's a tip: It sure would have saved me years of misery (and a lifetime of pap smears) had someone said: You don't have to have sex with boys. Ever. Liking girls is just fine. You could even grow up to marry one.

Vermont Makes History After All!

Vermont proves that the incremental approach does work. Vermont's leg didn't start with full equality... nor is it the only one to have voted in favor of equality. ("Firsts" are always complicated.) Some history: A decade ago, Vermont's top court ordered the legislature to recognize same-sex couples some way, somehow. (I remember interviewing those first plaintiffs for Out magazine—seems like millenniums ago.) That decision led to the nation's first "civil union" law, roughly equivalent to what Scandinavia was then calling "registered partnerships." The predicted locusts and plagues failed to descend.

Meanwhile, all around Vermont, marriage bells started ringing. In January 2001, at Vermont's northern border, Canada started marrying same-sex pairs. To Vermont's south, Massachusetts enacted marriage on May 17, 2004 (the 50^th anniversary of the SCOTUS's Brown v. Board of Education decision). And although the Massachusetts legislature didn't gender-neutralize marriage, state lawmakers repeatedly upheld the decision by overwhelming votes. Meanwhile, after California's population voted to ban recognition of same-sex marriage in 2000 (in response to Vermont's civil unions), its LGBT community started a long-term organizing project that resulted in a registered domestic partnership law as strong as Vermont's civil unions. The Golden State's legislature twice passed marriage bills, although lawmakers couldn't override the Governator's veto.

California's road toward marriage is too complicated to summarize—it involves several initiatives, a rogue mayor, a few court cases, and more than 35 million people. (Remember, California is more populous and demographically diverse than, say, Canada.) But my guess is that California will join the pro-marriage roster within five years. That might put it after New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, and who knows what other new state.

But today is Vermont's day—and proof that you can win if you aim for marriage, accept second-best temporarily, show your neighbors that having two legally coupled women next door doesn't scare the cows or turn children gay, and organize and lobby like hell for full equality. Hurray to my northern neighbors! Wish I could be there for the dance party! Iowa, Sweden, Vermont: What a cool spring it is to be gay!!

*Correction, April 7, 2009: The original post said "It makes me want to cry ... or run up to Burlington and kiss every legislator who voted to treat me as an full human being." A reader pointed out that Vermont legislators work out of the state capital, Montpelier, not Burlington.

Iowa Beats Vermont

... and not in football or hockey or whatever sport would bring the two together, but in the race to be the third American state to gender-neutralize its marriage laws. According to today's Iowa Supreme Court decision, scheduled to take effect 21 days from now, same-sex couples should be free to marry.

I grew up in Illinois and Ohio and moved to the greater Cambridge, Mass., area for many different reasons: the intellectualism, the politics, and—not least—what we used to call the "women's community" (now we would say "for the girls")—just as my Ohio University best buddy, Eric, moved to San Francisco for the boys. I used to joke that I was very happy to have escaped the vowel states for some solidly consonant-bound locations. Although I have been known to tell my piously liberal New England friends that they ought to get out and visit America sometimes, I have actually been relieved to live in a region so friendly to my various proclivities.

When a Lambda Legal attorney first told me they were bringing a marriage lawsuit in Iowa, you could have heard my eyes roll before I started arguing that it was a bad idea. My LGBT advocate friends told me I was wrong: Iowa was, for many reasons, a friendly state for such a suit. They were right. I was wrong. The vowels have it. Congratulations, Hawkeyes, on your commitment to equal protection under the law!

I hope you manage to keep it!

(Note to Vermont: See if you can become No. 4 before California or New Hampshire beats you to it.)

... The Swedes do it!

And an update to my earlier post on Vermont teetering on the brink of opening the m-word to same-sex pairs: The Swedes have just done it. Sweden has had an all-but-marriage regime much like civil unions, called registered partnerships, for about 15 years. Today the country passed a law gender-neutralizing marriage entirely, 261-22, joining the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Canada, South Africa, and Norway in going all the way—beyond partial recognition to full equality.

Watch for the rest of Scandinavia next. Which may or may not include Vermont.

Same-Sex Marriage in Vermont?

Speaking of another kind of freedom, last week, the Vermont Senate has passed a bill that would enable same-sex couples to marry, and not just get civilly unionized (civilly united? civilized?).The Vermont House is expected to pass the bill this week. The governor says he'll veto it—despite a survey showing that 55 percent of Vermonters are in favor, a few percentage points more than last year. No one knows whether there will be enough votes to override his veto. If the bill passes, Vermont would be the third American state with full marriage rights for same-sex pairs—and the first to have successfully done it via the legislature. (The California legislature passed marriage bills twice, but everything in California ends up in the initiative process and in the courts ... more details here.)

I am sure that some of you thought that civil unions and marriage were functionally equivalent. Not really. Vermont public radio interviewed me yesterday about the difference between civil unions and marriage, the hilarious history of marriage, the hard-fought and incremental gender-neutralization of marriage law over the past 150 years, and why same-sex couples belong today. Listen here, if you have a couple of extra minutes to kill. 

Don't Go to Florida: On Not Getting To See Your Dying Beloved in the Hospital

I hate these stories. My head is full of scores of them. I heard my first one nearly 20 years ago, when my friends Matt and Mark (names changed—it was a long time ago!) told me that when Mark was shot while on a business trip, the Dallas hospital that was treating him refused to tell Matt (technically a stranger) whether Mark was dead or alive. Matt called for six hours before he got the news. After being terrified by that hair-raising story, my then-beloved and I got our documents written and notarized within the week. (She's now my beloved ex, after 19 years together, but that's another story entirely.) During those 20 years, I wrote a book about the history of marriage and why same-sex couples belong. A marriage movement took shape, including some now-famous lawsuits. We won in Massachusetts, my home state, and Connecticut; we won partial partnership recognition (called things like "civil unions" or "domestic partnership" and so on) in another 10 states; we won the dubious privilege of celesbians getting full-color and front-page photo coverage in People while dating and getting married (cf: Ellen and Portia's big fat white wedding). Meanwhile, most of the United States came to agree that same-sex partners ought to, at a minimum, be able to hold hands in the hospital, for God's sake.

And still, because Lisa Marie Pond—who was on a cruise ship with her beloved and their three children—had the misfortune of having a heart attack while off the coast of Miami, she had to die alone, without the woman she loved.

It breaks my heart.

How Not To Fix Prop 8

I hate to say this, but I'm not a fan of a key piece of the challenge to Proposition 8 that same-sex marriage advocates are bringing in the California Supreme Court. By all means, ask the court to recognize the 18,000 same-sex marriages performed since it ushered in legalization last June. Laws shouldn't change retroactively, with marriages approved by the state one day and shunned the next. It's true that this case doesn't fit perfectly into the constitutional doctrine based on what's called the ex post facto clause, which prevents laws from changing up on people after the fact. (That's because traditionally, ex post facto applies to criminal laws.) But if ever there was a time for expanding that doctrine, for fairness' sake, this is it.

 The part of the court challenge that makes me skittish is the claim that Prop 8 is simply unconstitutional because it's a major revision to California's constitution, instead of just an amendment, and so the legislature has to separately approve it. This sounds like legal jabber (a revision vs. an amendment--huh?), and I fear that the political price for a ruling like this would be too high. Last summer, the state supreme court took a big step by legalizing same-sex marriage. Now, like it or not, the voters have rejected that ruling. I'm not a fan of state referenda--they make it way too easy to pass bad laws, and California has suffered from them in the past. (Remember Prop 13, which decimated school funding?) But if you have a referendum system, you have to live with it. Or at least you don't turn to the branch of government farthest from the will of the electorate to overturn a law born of the process that's closest to the will of the government. To get out of the Prop 8 fix, California needs another amendment that reverses it. The current challenge is the right battle, but the wrong tactic.
 

Too Sad Over California's Prop 8

Despite all else—the good news, for instance, that South Dakotans rejected harsh restrictions on women's uteri, and Colorado laughed at the idea that a fertilized egg is a person—let me just add how deeply sad I am that in Proposition 8, California's 38 million people decided, 52 percent to 48 percent, that two women or two men should not have their marriages recognized by the law. In the last few weeks, when the polls got close, I was extremely worried. The much-discussed Bradley effect may not actually exist, but a "homo effect" does. When LGBT issues go up for a popular vote, that vote has usually run about four points more against us than pollsters predict. The (barely) good news is that the effect has shrunk: The result was only 2 percent worse than predicted. But a loss is still a loss.

There's lots to say, and maybe I will pull out of my sadness and say it another time. Important to remember that California is an enormous and complicated state, more populous than Canada, as diverse as the nation politically. For instance, it has the largest Mormon population outside Utah and a large evangelical megachurch base. Its vast poor and rural stretches have opinions that differ greatly from those of San Franciscan liberals. And so while some counties went overwhelmingly in favor of retaining same-sex marriage, the more conservative counties went overwhelmingly against. Men were against same-sex marriage while women were 50-50; younger people were (overwhelmingly) for same-sex marriage while older people were against.

I am sad even though I know that, in 20 years, that vote will go the other way—maybe even in 10. Much sooner than that, I believe, some other American state will join Massachusetts and Connecticut (and Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands, South Africa, Spain—and, as of last spring, Norway) in opening up the M-word to same-sex pairs. And I am sad even though this wasn't a total rejection of same-sex unions: California's domestic partnership law is the equivalent of Vermont's civil unions, as comprehensive a set of recognitions and protections as you can get, short of the M-word itself—and California voters have let that stand.

Still, it stings to be told that your ability to love is not worthy of the word marriage. You can commit yourself for life, raise children together, pray over your sick beloved's body in the ER, or have the same argument for years about whose relatives you visit on Thanksgiving, but get the state's recognition that it's a real marriage? Nope. It's painful.

Guess I'm staying in Massachusetts—where my neighbors are still overwhelmingly proud to be first—after all.

Breaking News: Same-Sex Marriage in Connecticut!

It's official: Same-sex couples can now enter legally recognized marriages in three American states—Massachusetts, California, and Connecticut. (Countries include Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands, South Africa, and Spain ... I don't think I've missed any nations, but a Scandinavian country might have snuck in while I wasn't paying attention. All the other developed countries, except for the United States, have some kind of partner recognition for same-sex pairs, roughly equivalent to Vermont's and New Jersey's civil unions, as do a handful of Latin American countries' provinces or states.)

Connecticut's Supreme Court issued its decision about an hour ago. I haven't had a chance to read it, but I wanted to congratulate the 3.5 million residents of the state directly to my south on joining my state in treating its lesbian and gay couples as fully and honorably equal. (More info about the decision will be appearing here.)

I do hope that the voters of California—who will have a chance on Nov. 4 to either undo or uphold their state's gender-neutral marriages—will take heart from being joined by another New England state. California's anti-marriage forces have been lying in their television ads, saying that California's marriage code will force churches to marry same-sex couples even if that's against their religious beliefs. That's just false. Nobody's hurt when the state recognizes that two women or two men can and do promise to care for each other for life—and need the legal tools to fulfill the obligations they make in those vows.

Mazel tov to Connecticut! Considering the catastrophic financial headlines lately, how lovely to get some good news!

California Dreaming

For the rest of us: Did anyone see Pam Belluck's New York Times article on Sunday about lesbian and gay Massachusetts married couples? Except for the fact that it was primarily illustrated with photos of male couples (not her fault), the story was almost embarrassingly on target. She was entirely accurate about the ordinariness of lesbian and gay couples' attitudes toward marriage, now that the initial rush and excitement is over: As she notes, the numbers marrying have fallen off precipitously, the pent-up demand having been spent. Now we're marrying in more ordinary proportions.

But I got a call from a reporter today who was surprised by our ordinariness, asking: Isn't there something unique about how gay and lesbian folks respond to marriage? Well, no. Remember that we were born and raised in every ZIP code in the country, in every possible subculture, from the Bronx to Bellingham, Wash. We tend to relate to marriage the way our social peers or siblings do. The Cambridge politico gals—the ones who wash out and reuse their Ziploc bags—are going to have a different take on marriage than the Dallas debutante couples who get their hair freshly dyed every four weeks, whose take take will be just as different from that of the D.C. black-church-choir male couple. We are no more unified about our attitudes toward marriage than the rest of you. 

But what Belluck did nail, embarrassingly so, was the different attitudes that men and women bring to marriage—amplified when both halves of the pair are the same sex. Whether it's nature, nurture, or culture, men and women do have some different predilections. A couple of weeks ago, when y'all were having that monogamy discussion, I bit my tongue about this. But Belluck has now outed us, so I'll chime in.

1. More women date with an eye toward serious partnerships. You know the joke, right? Q: What does a lesbian bring on her second date? A: A U-Haul. Everywhere that same-sex partnerships have been recognized, female couples sign up at twice the rate of male couples. That's two female marriages for every male marriage. That doesn't mean every woman is marriage-minded—generalizations can never fit everyone in a given group—but women do seem to be, quite literally, twice as interested in marriage as men.

2. Men marry without seeing it as necessarily monogamous. Here's the other half of that joke: Q: What does a gay man bring on a second date? A: What second date? Many gay male couples—not all, as my gay male friends have insisted to me!—leave room for the occasional meaningless sexual encounter. God bless 'em. I hope they are all wearing condoms.

3. Women are serially monogamous. If anybody cheats, it's over—but only sexually, not necessarily emotionally. I used to joke that the waiting period for female-female marriage licenses ought to be two years: If they're still together by then, they should be safe until about year seven. Here's the embarrassing part: Belluck finds a few lesbian couples who've broken up and yet who remain each others' families. (She even airs the dirty laundry of women who leave their gals and start dating men instead—many butch women I know have had to return their toasters when their gals went straight!—but she leaves out the problem of the "straight" married lady next door who starts hitting on you.) One such couple in her story is buying a duplex so that they can still raise their son together. Oy, lesbians and their exes! By the time you get to middle age, you are never dating just one woman; you are dating her entire family of exes and exes' exes. Those are going to be your in-laws, so you might as well make a good impression on them early. They have the key to her house. They walk her dog when she's away. If you have kids, they will babysit for you when you need a night alone together. Learn to love them.

5. Same-sex couples are less likely to go nuclear when they argue. OK, this is from a Science Times article earlier in the week, not the Belluck article, but this also rings true to me. If you're not blaming the entire sex for being incomprehensible, you have a little more room to laugh. My ex and I used to take each others' side in the really common arguments. It made us laugh and it helped. Until it didn't. The other point in this article also rings true: We argue just as often, and in many of the same ways. Consider what they call the "demand-withdraw" approach: One side pushes for more intimacy and the other withdraws. Two women or two men have that too. It broke up my own marriage.

Because of all the above, I'm going to guess that lesbians divorce more often—expectations are higher—and that gay male marriages last longer—they are less likely to marry in the first place, more likely to forgive straying. But I haven't seen numbers on that yet.

Once again to the Californians: Good luck, and may you persuade your neighbors that they have nothing to fear from the married women next door!

Not Her Mother's Feminism

Two things bother me about the Rebecca Walker essay (which last week stirred up a hot intergenerational discussion on a feminist listserv I'm on). First is her conflation of her mother and feminism. I'm sorry, but when did Alice Walker become the spokesperson for and avatar of the second wave? One older (in her 60s, I think) feminist writer on that listserv wrote that her version of feminism didn't posit motherhood as slavery; rather, her feminism meant trying to enlarge the world so that men and women didn't have to divide up the worlds of work and family because each would be involved in both. In that vision of feminism, men and women both would be important in children's lives--as would some social responsibility for children's futures, including early childhood education, flextime, and all the other things necessary to allow families to integrate work and childrearing (and, let me add, being human). That's the feminism that I learned and subscribe to. Walker, instead, personalizes her mother's mistakes (or her perception of those mistakes--hard to know whether memoirists are reliable narrators) as if Alice Walker's bad behavior stood for the mothering failures of the entire second wave. Um ... nope.

Second is the way Walker elides her relationship with Meshell (note: new spelling). Of course her past life is public and all over the Internet; there's no way she can pretend she has only been heterosexual. But in this Daily Mail piece, her lesbian "phase" is elided from her neotraditionalist narrative, in which she is lost until she finds full life satisfaction from mommy + daddy = baby. Oy. (Note for later blog post: Today California begins marrying same-sex couples! Hurray for the Golden State!)

My novice impression is that the younger Walker is melting down and has some institution in her future. But I don't know the woman, and who am I to psychologize without a license? Her mental state is none of my business. Her politics ... well, it isn't even a politics. It's just whining.

Huge. Big. Deal.

EJ. What a tremendous post. Thank you.

And yes, you are right, the decision to treat the same-sex plaintiffs in this case as a suspect class, warranting “strict scrutiny”—the most rigorous and unforgiving type of constitutional review—is a huge big deal and a step the courts had not been willing to take. The sharp-eyed Marty Lederman caught it last night in this post at Convictions.

California: Girl + Girl = Marriage

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?