Puerto Rico Jumps on Board

Well, it had to happen, and it did, and predictably…

…not everybody is happy about it.

The “it” in question being the federal lawsuit that Ada Conde filed on Tuesday to have her marriage to her same-sex partner, Yvonne Álvarez Vélez, legally recognized in Puerto Rico.

The couple was married in 2004 in Massachusetts, the first state to allow same-sex marriages. And since Puerto Rico amended the statute on marriage in 1999 to define marriage as existing between a man and a woman—Conde and Álvarez are out in the cold (however cold it may be in Puerto Rico….)

And that last parenthesis has some degree of truth—though we occasionally think of ourselves as backwards on LGBTQ issues, we actually don’t do badly, especially when compared to the rest of the Caribbean. As proof, I commend you to an article in USA Today with the headline “Puerto Rico Slowly Warms to More Gay Rights.”

We have, for example, law 238 of 2013 that bans discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. As well, the laws that deal with domestic violence have been expanded to include all households, including gay and lesbian ones. In addition, our hate crime legislation was amended to include sexual orientation as a protected category.

There have been setbacks. The state Supreme Court upheld the law banning gay couples from adopting kids, and last year some 200,000 people, whipped up by a pastor named Wanda Rolón, marched against same-sex marriage. But consider that, in Jamaica recently, a 26-year old gay activist was found stabbed to death; overall, Puerto Rico is doing well on LGBT issues.

Which you might not know—judging from the comments in the local newspaper about the federal lawsuit that Conde filed. Here’s a sample—by no means the most virulent:

Gracias por llamarnos retrógrados. Ahora, pregunto yo: Desde cuando el matrimonio es un derecho civil??? Dónde está eso en la Constitución como derecho garantizado? El problema es que en algún momento algún tipo entonces se vá a presentar y decir que sus derechos civiles fueron cuartados porque no lo dejan casarse con, por ejemplo, su pingüino. Es lo que llamamos el /slippery slope/...una vez que esto empieza, dónde termina? La sociedad va en decadencia. eso es todo! [Sic.]

(“Thanks for calling us retrograde. Now I wonder: since when is marriage a civil right??? Where in the constitution is it a guaranteed right? The problem is that at some moment somebody is going to stand up and say that his rights were violated because they didn’t let him marry, for example, his penguin. It’s what we call the slippery slope—once you start, where do you stop? Society is going into decadency—that’s all!”)

And even more ingenious critique comes from the perennial Jorge Raschke, an evangelical minister who brings his “Clamor a Dios” to the capitol steps every Labor Day. Here’s what he has to say:

Puerto Rico es una jurisdicción no definida de los Estados Unidos y no puede imponer sus valores culturales y sus decisiones en lo que toca a su cultura porque en esa área lo que impera es el derecho internacional”, dijo Raschke.

(“Puerto Rico is an undefined territory of the United States and the US cannot impose its cultural values and decisions as to its culture because in that area international law applies,” said Raschke.)

Hmmm—shades of the argument Ugandans raise that the West cannot impose its views on homosexuality on Africa, that somehow it’s part of African identity to be homophobic?

And so we’re left with two questions. The first is whether the commonwealth is going to defend the statute defining marriage as between a man and a woman. The current government is generally pro-gay; several voices in the ruling party are urging the Secretary of Justice not to defend the statute.

Lastly, there’s the question of whether the suit will succeed. One commentator, Eudaldo Báez Galib, calls the federal court “un ambiente bueno”—a favorable environment. But who knows?

Last weekend I met a man from Wisconsin who mentioned that he had married his partner, a young man from Russia who is in the United States on a student visa. In the course of the conversation, it developed that the young man would have to return to Russia for a period of time before being able to renew his visa.

It raised a difficult question—how could the United States morally send back a young gay man to a country with draconian anti-gay laws, and with rising hate crimes directed against gay people? And had that consideration been behind the decision for the two to get married?

It’s easy for some people to see the issue of same-sex marriage as a moral or social issue. But for many of us, it’s a profoundly practical one. If I die today, my property goes to my legal heirs, in this case my two brothers. If Raf goes into Intensive Care, I’m dependent on his parents for allowing me to visit. Social Security? Estate taxes? The list goes on and on.

As does the fight!

On Becoming a Footnote

OK—it’s 11:22 in the morning and what have I done?

Well, it must have been the fatigue following the exertion of becoming, with Mr. Fernández, a footnote in the legal history of Puerto Rico—that must be what’s operating, here.

It was in 2008 that, on a cold December morning, Rafael and I walked into the Cambridge City Hall to get married. Had we made an appointment? Of course not. So the secretary sighed, and called the justice of the peace, Margaret Drury, down to marry us.

Every trip to the altar—even when there’s no altar—is a long one. In our case, it was physically a long trip; I had spent the early part of the week in Wisconsin with my mother, who was recovering from open-heart surgery. I had flown out of a huge snowstorm, missed a flight in Miami, gotten back home, confirmed our flights to Boston—and discovered that Expedia had botched one leg of the journey. We eventually flew to New York, and took the bus to Boston. And then the snow began—the storm I had flown out of from Wisconsin I had bussed in into Boston.

I was still on edge on the day of my marriage—it had seemed unreal, somehow. But I had told my boss, the director of Human Resources, that I was getting married—and to whom. She asked how long we had been together, and I told her: twenty five years. “It’s high time,” she said. Later, meeting her in the crowded lunchroom, she kissed me, wished me a good trip, and bustled off to wash her hands. Glancing over her shoulder, she called out, “and congratulations on…the other thing!”

And so we referred to our wedding as “the other thing,’ throughout the trip.

I had told her, because I knew perfectly well what I was going to do: ask the company to put Raf on the health plan. He was between jobs—and his Cobra payment was a couple hundred dollars easily over what I would pay to put him on my company’s health plan.

So I found myself, after we returned, with my boss and the president of the largest company on the island—Wal-Mart Puerto Rico—arguing that if we had a statement in the Employee Handbook stating that we didn’t discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, shouldn’t gay spouses be included in the benefits? “I think you should,” said the president.

It was the first time anybody had raised the issue to him.

Was it easy to do that? No—my hands were wet, my mouth was dry, I was in the classic fight or flight response.

I also knew that I would do it, that I was right, and that if I didn’t do it, I was letting the next generation down. Drag queens fought in Stonewall for me, and if they can fight cops with Billy clubs, I could talk to a Colombian man in a small office in Puerto Rico.

My request was denied, of course, on the grounds that my marriage was not legal in Puerto Rico. OK—so I wrote requesting reconsideration from Bentonville. Oh, and I wrote a letter to the executive vice president for Human Resources for the entire company.

This is called rattling the cage, and somebody has to do it.

Bentonville never replied, so I sent a certified letter. That got a response.

So it became a tradition, in those last years of my time there—I would formally petition to put Raf on the health plan, and present my marriage certificate.

“What do you want me to do with this?” my buddy Karen would ask.

“Oh, just send me the same letter you sent last year,” I’d say.

“Ay, Marc….”

If the Internet were working, I could tell you who said, “courage is a muscle that becomes stronger with exercise.” Recently, I came out to a room full of strangers, blurting out, “Sweetheart, I’m your husband, not your friend,” after Raf, about to read a poem of my mother’s, referred to me as a friend. The whole room laughed—look, how threatening is a roomful of poets?

So it was natural to me, to protest when a notary public, in preparing a deed for an apartment I bought, referred to me as soltero, or bachelor.

“No, I’m married in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,” I said.

We went around about it; he explained that legally, I was a bachelor. We signed; I went home and had a drink. The lawyer went home and lost sleep.

In Puerto Rico, property sales are handled by a notary public, who must be as well a lawyer. So the notary public got it into his head—he knew he had to do something. The next day, he called the professional association that rules over the notaries, and asked them the question: what to do about a marriage legal in one state but not in Puerto Rico?

“It was great—they all took the question very seriously, and very respectfully,” said Tony, to give the notary his name.

Even the head of the association, with whom Tony finally ended up….

“Your job as a notary is to record the facts, not judge on the legality,” the director said. “You have to amend that deed, and state that Marc and Raf were married in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. And they both have to sign it….” The director went on to speculate—what happens if Puerto Rico is obliged to recognize all marriages from other states, including same-sex marriages?

So we did, but not before asking Tony if they the notary association had ever had the question put to them.

“No,” he said, “they had been waiting for it, but it had never come up. They’re actually thinking of writing a memo to all the notaries on the island, directing them to do what we’re doing. So yours will be the first gay marriage recorded on a legal document in Puerto Rico.”

“You really should spread the word around,” said Johnny, when I called to tell him the news. “There could be other gay people who need to be aware that their marriages need to be recorded….”

So I have!

The Killer in Your Kitchen

It was the alert doña Taí who advised me of it.

“You ever heard of the Boston Molasses Disaster?”

Sounds like a joke, doesn’t it? And if it weren’t, why, having lived in Boston for a year, had I never heard of it? Definitely something to check out.

It seems that on 15 January 1919, a huge vat of molasses exploded in the North End of Boston, creating a 40-foot wave that rushed through the city. Killed 21 people and several horses; 150 people were injured. And it did some serious damage to infrastructure. Take a look below….

Well, in my zeal to alert the international readership of this blog, I checked all this out in Wikipedia. Only to discover that there was a reference to another disaster.

The London Beer Flood.

Jump back a century or so, to 1814, in the St. Giles section of London. A vat of beer explodes, and causes other vats to explode in a domino effect. All in all, 323,000 imperial gallons (no idea what that is, but it sounds impressive…) of beer flood the city. St. Giles is an area of poor houses, with many families living in basements. These flood, and the death toll is eight.

Well, it seems that nothing is safe anymore. There are killers in the schools. Molasses can kill. Beer as well, in a way I had never thought.

With all the mayhem afoot, I’m happy to report that a great bunch of kids from Ponce, Puerto Rico, decided to cheer up a food court in their hometown. Here they are, in full swing!