Still a Lot to Do

Somewhere in Puerto Rico, there’s an unhappy and confused twelve-year old girl.

In the grand scheme of affairs, that’s not too bad. Atrocious things are happening all over the world to kids—famine, abuse, displacement. The little girl, whose name no one knows, has two good parents, both professionals, and presumably all the comforts of the upper middle class. In short, she’s well-off, a nice kid living with her two parents who are…

…lesbians.

Ho-hum, you say, and what’s the big deal here?

Well, the mother who is not the biological mother would like to adopt her daughter. In short, she wants to be legally recognized as a mother. And the Puerto Rico Supreme Court has just said, in a 5 / 4 decision, no.

So what, you say. The couple has been together for 25 years, they planned the child together, the I-don’t-want-to-say unnatural mother was the first face the child saw when she was born. No one’s going anywhere….

Yeah? Do we know that? What if the birth mother (don’t know if that’s a term, but it is now) gets hit by a bus tomorrow? Does the Family Department have the right to come in and take the child and assign her to foster care?

There’s also something called divorce, in which case the non-birth mother would be out in the cold. A father could argue for every other weekend and two weeks in the summer, but the non-birth mother? She’d better hope for a good judge.

Predictably, the decision fell on political lines. Our former governor, who was / is a poster boy for the GOP (and implemented the same strategies two years before Scott Walker of Wisconsin) was rumored to be Opus Dei. There were, according to some, prayers—and by no means ecumenical—before meetings. So all of his appointees have dictated the fate of this mothered / motherless child.

The scene is looking potentially better in Washington, where the Supreme Court will begin deliberating on the Proposition 8 decision on March 26. As you remember, the citizens of California—funded liberally by the Mormons—voted against marriage equality in 2008. The decision was challenged, and eventually a federal district court ruled that the citizens didn’t have the right to determine who gets married and who doesn’t. Now, the Supreme Court is going to decide it.

In addition, the Defense of Marriage Act—signed into law by that devoted family man, that upholder of traditional values, that pillar of moral and sexual rectitude Bill Clinton—is up for deliberation by the Supreme Court. Curiously, the court is hearing the DOMA case one day after the Proposition 8 case.

It’s been a long road, this battle for the rights of LGBT folks. So long that it’s a little hard to see how much progress we’ve made in so—relatively—little time. I was born in the worst decade of the twentieth century, perhaps, for gay people—a decade where Joe McCarthy was flaunting a list of “homosexuals” employed by the government, which by executive order made it illegal to be gay and work in the federal government. Gay bashing was not speaking ill of gay people—it was literally assault on men leaving the bars at night. Families routinely invaded houses that two men and women had made homes for years after one partner died—and the legal battles weren’t easy or pretty.

So we’ve done a lot. There’s a reason so many fundamentalists are going crazy: they’re seeing their world vanish.

A lot, yes.

But still so much to do….