A Hotbed of Homosexuals

Note: this post was originally to be published over a month ago; for technical reasons, Mr. Fernández and I are not joining the suit. Wish we were! 
_________________

It was a message I found a little screwy, until I went onto a Facebook page entitled “Boicot contra Pedro Julio Serrano por sus comentarios de odio hacia cristianos;” the film-equivalent of the page would be that scene in The Shining when Jack Nicholson….

…you remember it, right?

The message we were receiving, last night, was that we were being brave, incredibly brave, for standing up and demanding our rights and refusing to be second-class citizens. What I was thinking, however, was what an incredibly boring group of people we were.

Confession—I have so often wished I had the life that some fundamentalist Christians think I have. Because, wow—what fun that could be: going from the orgy to the ecstasy-fueled rave to the drug-frenzied satanic rituals with the inverted crosses and the squealing newborn about to be sacrificed on the altar! Whee!

Instead it’s:

Marc: Hey, have you seen the garlic press?

Raf: Many times!

Marc: Very funny—now where the hell is that press?

Raf: How should I know? You washed it.

Marc: Dammit, do you want to eat or not?

All right—this is a rather low example of domestic life, but that’s the point. And so I found myself looking, last night, at the six gay and lesbian couples who had assembled in the law offices of LGBT activist Ada Conde and thinking how ordinary we all were: nobody was in drag, the whips and chains had decently been left at home, and there wasn’t a strand of purple hair. It was as lurid as a Tupperware party.

Not that there weren’t some serious people: two lawyers from Lambda Legal had flown in from New York, and Lambda Legal, about whom I’ve read for years, is major. Here’s what their website says:

With the generous support of thousands of friends around the country, what began in 1973 as a couple of volunteers working out of a spare room in a supporter’s apartment has now grown to an expert staff of more than 80 in five offices around the country—New York, Atlanta, Dallas, Chicago and Los Angeles. 

What didn’t I know? Well, the organization’s bylaws were borrowed from the Puerto Rico Legal Defense and Education Fund. Nor did I know—though I may have forgotten it—that the organization had to fight for its very existence. Here’s the site again:

A panel of New York judges turned down our application to be a nonprofit organization because, in their view, our mission was "neither benevolent nor charitable." With pro bono help, Thom appealed to New York’s highest court, which finally allowed Lambda Legal to exist as a nonprofit organization.

Since then, it’s easier to list what they haven’t done than what they have, since short of bringing down DOMA and Proposition 8, they’ve done it all.   

In addition to the two lawyers from Lambda, we were joined by a constitutional lawyer from the University of Puerto Rico School of Law. Then, two more lawyers came in, from the staff of the president of the senate, Eduardo Bhatia. ‘It’s come at last,’ I thought, ‘I finally have a legal team….’

We were there to join the lawsuit brought by Conde to force the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico to recognize her marriage to her wife. And by doing so, we would become the first state / territory in the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. Why? Because for reasons I’ve never understood, Puerto Rico belongs to the First Circuit, which lives in Boston and comprises the New England states, all of which have sensibly adopted same-sex marriage. So it’s up to Puerto Rico to carry the torch.

And Puerto Rico, as Pedro Julio reminded us, has every reason to be proud: we are by no means backward in legislation regarding employment and hate crimes, and most of the work has been done by volunteers who have gotten out there and shouted.

And Pedro Julio should know, since he’s the founder, in Puerto Rico, of Puerto Rico para tod@s and the communications manager for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, in New York City. So Pedro Julio has a foot in both places; this weekend, he’s on the island.

“What was that thing about the death threat,” I asked Raf after the meeting. I remembered vaguely that somebody had tweeted a death threat to Pedro Julio, and that they had found the guy. But whatever happened to the guy?

Thanks to Google, I can tell you: Pedro Julio had intended to go to the march celebrating the Día Internacional contra la Homofobia y Transfobia, when some guy—whose name I know, but why give it?—tweeted that Pedro Julio could end up like some guys had in the Boston Marathon. The FBI found the guy, he was tried in federal court and sentenced to three years in prison, three years probation, and three years of being Twitterless.

In fact, Pedro Julio had warned the public, in January of last year, that he had been receiving more death threats:

“Durante mis más de 15 años de activismo, he recibido innumerables amenazas de muerte, pero nunca en la cantidad y la hostilidad de los últimos días".

(“In over 15 years of activism, I have received innumerable death threats, but never in the quantity and level of hostility as in recent days.”)

‘There are levels of “out,”’ I thought, ‘which is funny, since I thought I was pretty—sorry about this—far out. But I’m a piker next to Pedro Julio or Ada….’

And one of the things about being out is that it gets normal after a while. A man I know was once asked by his new boss, “and what’s your wife’s name?” The boss was trying to prep for the Christmas party.

“John,” said my friend, who is also named John.

“That makes it easy,” said the boss.

This is the stuff we do every day, until it becomes no big deal. So it’s easy to forget how very, very important, as well as difficult, being out can be.

“I think I was put on this earth to fight this fight,” said Yolanda, meaning the fight of the night: getting Puerto Rico to recognize same-sex marriage. The whole room inhaled.

“She’s been in tears four times this evening,” remarked Ada, “and now, it’s five.”

The night had started being somewhat routine: a meeting to go to, some people to meet, then bus back home and hit the sack. But it changed with Yolanda’s remark.

‘It is a big deal,’ I thought. ‘And there’s a reason why we drive the fundamentalists nuts, why Pedro Julio has two pages boycotting him on Facebook: we are a threat. What we’re proposing is fundamental, too. There is nothing more fundamental than the right to declare who your husband or wife will be, and have that decision respected by the state.’

I looked around the room and began to wonder—how much extra struggle had it taken each of us, and each couple, to realize that she or he was gay, to embrace it, to announce it to family and friends, to bosses and—now—to the public at large?

In the week of my mother’s death, I was sitting on a miraculously beautiful spring twilight talking with my brother John.

“You’ve had it so much harder than either Eric or I did,” he said. He meant coming out, struggling with the inner-demon of the cello, facing down my father over my being gay, moving to a foreign-in-a-domestic-sense land, learning a new language, being jobless, losing my mind, and providing the way out for my mother, when she wanted to die. So I thought about all that.

“You may be right,” I told him.

But it was also worth it….

Two Bloggers and Twelve Old Men

OK—here’s what I hadn’t considered. First of all, the people are really nice: friendly, cheerful, and definitely hard working. Second of all, the church keeps you busy, going from meeting to prayer groups to God-knows-what-all. Remember that they had organized everybody so much that they had to declare a special night for everyone just to stay home? Also, the church takes over the smallest details of your life—even down to that famous underwear….

You’ll know by now that I’m talking about the Mormon Church, which fought like Tasmanian devils against marriage equality in California, then backed off and pretended to get more inclusive when Mitt Romney was running for president, and which now is accusing two of its members of—ah, the horror of it all!—apostasy.

Well, it’s a highly charged word in Mormon circles, since the Mormons, like the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Seventh Day Adventists, believe in the Great Apostasy. You’ll want to know: it’s the belief that everybody and every religion was wrong from the death of Jesus to the birth of their own church.

So what have the two Mormons done to get this label thrust on them? Well, John Dehlin advocates for the rights of LGBT people within the church. Kate Kelly set up a group that advocates for the ordination of women, as well as for increasing the role of women in the church.

Both have gotten letters from their local bishops, advising them that they will be tried and face either disfellowship or excommunication. Disfellowship may take various forms, but excommunication is dire indeed: you are erased from the church as if you had never existed. And though the church doesn’t officially practice shunning, your social calendar will definitely be much lighter. Oh, and all those business contacts? You might be leaving a lot of voice mails, and getting fewer returned calls.

And so for these two, excommunication is a major, and perhaps terrifying, possibility. Consider what one writer had to say:

Mormonism is an "all or nothing" commitment, Rosen explains. "If Pandora's box is opened regarding questioning one policy or mandate, it leads to more, because it's all connected. It's not like other religions, where you can accept some parts and reject other parts. You have to accept the whole kit and caboodle. You have to accept every [church-mandated] 'calling.' You have to go to every three-hour church meeting. If I didn't go [to synagogue] for six months, the rabbi would be like, 'I am so happy to see you.' You can't do that as a Mormon."

Ready for the next paragraph?

Utah has the highest rate of clinical depression out of any state in the country, and the seventh highest suicide rate, according to a report by Thomson Healthcare. Rosen believes the LDS stance on homosexuality contributes to these statistics. One third of her patients are homosexuals who grew up LDS, and many of them were kicked out of their homes.

Well, it’s not surprising that Utah has the highest rate of depression, since wouldn’t you be depressed, attending up to thirty hours of church activities weekly, and having to smile all the time?

Right—that’s unfair, and especially wrong since Dehlin, who is straight, has taken a big risk for those of us who are LGBT. Besides his website Mormon Stories, he also has another site advocating gay marriage. And he’s finishing up his doctorate in counseling at Utah State University—not a particularly easy time to be butting the twelve elderly white male heads that run the church. But you have to admire a guy who can write, as he did in his website:

I believe in many of the central, non-distinctive moral teachings within Mormonism (e.g., love, kindness, charity, forgiveness, faith, hope), but either have serious doubts about, or no longer believe many of the fundamental LDS church truth claims (e.g., anthropomorphic God, “one true church with exclusive authority,” that the current LDS church prophet receives privileged communications from God, that The Book of Mormon and The Book of Abraham are translations, polygamy, racist teachings in the Book of Mormon, that ordinances are required for salvation, proxy work for the dead).

So on 7 June 2014, Dehlin got the letter that he must have been dreading. And the following day, Kelly got the letter as well. In her case, the trial will be this Sunday. In Dehlin’s case, it will be 29 June 14.

And while neither one could be criticized for losing some sleep over the matter, Kelly’s case seems to be particularly acute. Consider, for example, that she got a whole group of women together and tried to enter a male-only meeting on the priesthood at the tabernacle in Salt Lake City. Here are her heartbreaking words:

I suppose I didn’t realize until I was at the door and physically barred from entering the Tabernacle just how hopeful I was that we would indeed get in. I told the man who blocked us from entering, “I understand that all men, even men who are not members of the church and have no investment in Mormonism are permitted to attend. I am a returned missionary and a faithful Mormon woman and I would like to listen to the prophet in person.”

He simply said, “this session is actually for men only.”

And as difficult it is to read, it’s infinitely more painful to see the clip below.

I’ll never know—which would have been better, to be (as I am) a non-believer, or to grow up in some faith, have it enrich my life, rage against it when I came out, and then, perhaps, make my peace with it? What I do know is that believing in the church, wanting to be in the church, and then being expelled would be infinitely painful, especially in Utah.

And while I very much hope that these two courageous souls can prevail…

…I’m not putting money on it.

A Blogger Proposes Marriage

As proof of our suitability to marry, I bring you the following dialogue, ten days ago:

Raf: Did you hear about Wisconsin?

Marc: Period Garden Park?

Raf: Absolutely!

I admit it, as a child I used to wonder at my parents, who could telescope an entire conversation into about six words. Now I totally get it, because who needs to do the whole thing, which would be:

Raf: Did you hear about Wisconsin?

Marc: Yeah, isn’t that great? You think there’s a federal judge out there who’s willing to support a same-sex ban?

Raf: Nah…

Marc: Hey, wanna get married in the Period Garden Park?

Raf: Absolutely!

OK—it’s happening so fast that you may have missed it, since the accurate headline would run, “Ho-hum, Another Federal Judge Strikes Down Same-Sex Marriage Ban.” But a Friday or two ago, Judge Barbara Crabb joined the parade, and issued her ruling. And she slung a few, rather crabby—sorry, had to—remarks to all those who believe in “traditional” marriage. She pointed out that, for most of humankind, marriage ha been between one man and multiple women, and was that where we wanted to revisit?

Undoubtedly, the judge had been reading this blog—I think that’s totally neat, and sorry, Judge, for poking fun at your name. (I know what that’s like, since I’ve spent a lifetime being called Marc Outhouse…)

At any rate, the judge ruled on a Friday afternoon, and then some neat stuff happened. There were the two guys who told the waitress in the pizzeria that they had just gotten married. So she told the boss, who promptly said that the food was on the house. That, of course, went viral—definitely good business move. Note—get ready for the Westboro Baptist Church, guys!

Then there was the county clerk of Milwaukee, who decided to open the clerk’s office on Saturday, a day it would normally be closed. So—this being Wisconsin—he paid for the whole thing out of his own pocket. And what’s happened to him now? He got slapped with a lawsuit, which is causing him, he says, no loss of sleep.

The predictable happened, meaning that 555 or some such number same-sex marriages took place, and then another federal judge put a stay on the ruling. So now the Wisconsin couples are in legal limbo, as are couples in various other states, including Utah and Michigan.

So, Dear Reader, you’re all invited to the Period Garden Park, on the second Saturday of June, 2015 to witness the consummation of what we started thirty-two years ago. That is…

Mr. Fernández, will you marry me?

(Here's what's NOT gonna happen!!!)

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!

Then and Now

Hey, you guys up there—slow down! You’re making me dizzy….

Last June, by one slim vote, the Supreme Court threw out the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). At that point—as I remember it—fewer than ten states allowed gay marriages. Now? It’s 17, and may be 18 if Michigan…

…sometime after five PM last Friday, U.S. District Judge Bernard Friedman issued a ruling after a two-week trial, based mostly on whether there was any evidence that kids were harmed by being raised in gay homes.

The judge—a conservative appointed by Ronald Reagan—decided no. And so he tossed out the ban on gay marriages, which had popular support a decade ago, though recently more and more people are scratching their heads, wondering what that was all about….

It was a weird time—those years when everybody was up in arms and needing to defend the sanctity of marriage. Was it that the ritual satanic abuse thing had faded? Because, remember—the fear had swept the country, starting out in a California daycare center, run by this woman Virginia McMartin? Here, Dear Readers, I present her fearsome visage—don’t look too long or too intently, lest the sulfurous stench of evil rise up and poison your eternal soul….

Look, she’s clearly not having the best day of her life, but satanic? And here, under the very appropriate heading “Bizarre Allegations,” is Wikipedia’s description of the affair.

Some of the accusations were described as "bizarre",[5] overlapping with accusations that mirrored the just-starting satanic ritual abuse panic.[4] It was alleged that, in addition to having been sexually abused, they saw witches fly, traveled in a hot-air balloon, and were taken through underground tunnels.[4] When shown a series of photographs by Danny Davis (the McMartins' lawyer), one child identified actor Chuck Norris as one of the abusers.[20]

Some of the abuse was alleged to have occurred in secret tunnels beneath the school. Several investigations turned up evidence of old buildings on the site and other debris from before the school was built, but no evidence of any secret chambers was found.[4] There were claims of orgies at car washes and airports, and of children being flushed down toilets to secret rooms where they would be abused, then cleaned up and presented back to their unsuspecting parents. Some interviewed children talked of a game called "Naked Movie Star" suggesting they were forcibly photographed nude.[1][4][21] During the trial, testimony from the children stated that the naked movie star game was actually a rhyming taunt used to tease other children—"What you say is what you are, you're a naked movie star,"—and had nothing to do with having naked pictures taken.

What happened was, according to Wikipedia, “the longest and most expensive criminal trial” as of 1990. The first allegations had arisen seven years earlier, in 1983; the case ended with charges being dropped.

Gay people are used to it—at least those of us who are of a sufficient age. Raf was told decades ago that he couldn’t see his young nephew, who now has a child of his own. Raf and I passed the child back and forth last year at a family reunion.

Oh, and remember Anita Bryant? Who can forget here explanation that gay people—not able to reproduce—had to be out “recruiting” children to keep the pink race going? Presumably, it was like a scene out of Boys Beware, a film from the 1950’s that will shock the hell out of you.

The film starts out well enough, with the cheerful—no, let’s call it peppy—music in the background as we see a police captain leaving the police department, on his way to go speak to some “young people” at the local high school. Along the way, he sees Jimmy Barnes, innocently trying to hitch a ride on the side of the road.

Alas, not all the people in the world are as innocent as Jimmy! Though the person who gave Jimmy the ride seemed nice enough—asking Jimmy questions, and giving him a pat on the shoulder as Jimmy got out of the car.

That’s when we see the driver, who until now has been only in profile. And need I say it? The face is satanic—wait, I’ll be a good blogger and figure out how to take a screen shot:

Jimmy, honey? You were riding home with that?

That, Dear Reader, is a proper 1950’s homosexual—and it’s also what we came out of, or away from. Because I was born in 1956, which meant that for the first decade of my life, this is what society was telling me I was going to grow up to be. Which meant I could repress my entire sexuality, or I could become utterly depraved, as this man was.

Nor are such types subtle—since the very next day, what happens? Yup, there the stranger is, after school, and today he decides to treat Jimmy to a Coke. And then the homosexual told a few off-color jokes—obviously testing the waters.

Look, I saw the clip a year ago, and really, I don’t need to see it again. In fact, having lived through the whole thing, and overcome it, I really prefer not to relive it. Suffice it to say that all turns out well for Jimmy, but that other boy?

“He became a statistic,” intones the 1950’s voice.

If you grew up with this garbage, it took real work to move away from it. It took therapy, group sessions, consciousness raising, activism, marching for the first time in a parade, telling your mother (guess what? It’s always mother first…) you were gay, walking three times around the block of the first gay bar you were hoping / dreading to go into, telling everybody you were gay—and now, how many years have passed? And surprise—you’re not done!

You’re not out of the closet, you see. Sure, you’ve done all of the above—you have weeded that garden as rigorously as you could, and then you get cruised by the pilot who has flown you 1600 miles to New York City. And what do you think, reflexively?

“They have gay pilots!!!”

Down on your knees, pulling more weeds!

There’s a twenty-ish gay guy two tables away talking to his friend, or his lover, or whoever he is or however they’re defining it. And his experience as a gay guy? He probably didn’t have to worry about getting kicked out of school, getting kicked out of his home, about being beaten silly when he left the bar.

But the good news? Other people have been pulling weeds, too, including conservative judges in Michigan, who got asked if he really would like to affirm a law that says that some people can get married, others cannot.  Here’s what  Friedman said:

In attempting to define this case as a challenge to “the will of the people,” state defendants lost sight of what this case is truly about: people. No court record of this proceeding could ever fully convey the personal sacrifice of these two plaintiffs who seek to ensure that the state may not longer impair the rights of their children and the thousands of others now being raised by same-sex couples.

So last Friday, Michigan had allowed gay marriages. Saturday, everybody ran down to City Hall to get hitched. Then the ax fell—the state’s attorney general asked for a stay, and so now gay marriages aren’t legal in Michigan. See?

It occurs to me—there’s something a little sad about how so many of us have done it: rushed frantically to get hitched before some hack of  a DA or AG runs off to the next court up to block it. Parents living the next state over don’t get to see the ceremony. Musicians who would have chosen Monteverdi’s Si dolce e’l tormento have to live with Whitney Houston.  The superb cooks are eating a store-bought cake and drinking champagne and grinning like fools and rubbing their eyes and calling their distant family.

One Michigan couple who got in under the wire was my old friend Geek, the celebrated chap who—having outwitted and outlasted Fred Phelps—took his lover of 27 year to the courthouse or city hall or wherever it was and brought him back as his husband.

And now, having scared the hell out of you by showing you a proper 1950’s homosexual—as well as that satanic grandmother—let me show you the updated version—considerably less menacing….

Congratulations, Geek and Martín!

Come to Think of it, the Eiffel is Kinda Sexy….

Well, if Cousin Ruthie said it, it had to be real, but all the same, it seemed incredible. And indeed, The Huffington Post confirmed it:

The "marriage evasion" law criminalizes leaving the state to “contract a marriage that is prohibited or void” in Wisconsin. Couples violating the marriage evasion statute can be fined up to “$10,000 or imprisoned for not more than 9 months or both.”

So that means that a gay or lesbian couple who drive across the bridge to the Twin Cities, get married, and then drive back over the bridge to Wisconsin have committed a criminal act in Wisconsin.

There’s good and bad news. First, the law has been on the books since 1915, when “marriage evasion” laws were popular: the laws were intended to prevent inter-racial marriages, in general, but also marriages to minors or recently divorced people. (Wisconsin, apparently, has a six-month waiting period for remarriage….)

The other good news?  

The law hasn’t been enforced since 2001, when a man left the state to get remarried 30 days after his divorce was finalized.

Now for the bad news: the law is still on the books. And guess what? Well, here’s the Wisconsin Gazette on the subject:

ACLU of Wisconsin executive director Chris Ahmuty said it’s not difficult to imagine a rogue district attorney apprehending a same-sex couple married out of state in order to make a statement or score political points, just as renegade county clerks in New Mexico and Pennsylvania are handing out marriage licenses to test the law in those states.

And, in fact, the Gazette goes on to say that in 2009, the CEO of the Wisconsin Family Council (note—any title with “freedom, “family,” or “heritage” in it should give you the shivers) said this:

“You purposely left the state or another state and you get married and you know it’s not going to be legal where you reside and you have every intention of returning. That’s defrauding the government,” Appling said in the interview.

And who is Appling? Well, the Gazette wonderfully supplies the answer:

Appling, a never-married woman who has lived for decades with another never-married woman in a home they own jointly in Watertown, continues to work fiercely against equality.

Well, any conscientious blogger would check out the Wisconsin Family Council, so I took a deep breath, and clicked on the link. Fortunately, though, I got a message saying that the website certificate was invalid. This I took to be a sign: the universe was letting me off the hook. But who was Julaine Appling?

Well, The Huffington Post, via the Cap Times had the answer: "the most important social conservative in the state." Oh, and she was also reported to be the driving force behind the (gag) defense of marriage amendment to Wisconsin’s constitution in 2006.

And here’s what she said when asked about whether she was, err, you know…that way:

"I would submit there’s not a person alive who hasn’t said, 'Well, I wonder,' because of the culture we live in, the time we live in," Appling, 60, told the Times. "It's a natural part of the maturation process. It's not a life sentence."

Oh, but not to worry, because “people have left gay lifestyles by the droves successfully.”

Whew, so there’s hope!

Which is lucky, because it seems I’m on the slippery slope. Fortunately, Mr. Fernández hates the French, so I’m unlikely to be tempted, but an Iowan, living in that cesspool of sin that permits gay marriage, has news for me. You can see it in the clip below, or—so says the Iowan—you can simply google “red herring,” and what you’ll see will shock you.

Well, the red herring was a red cape to my inner bull, so I did that, and discovered nothing more noxious than the standard definitions. But add “gay marriage” into the mix? Your eyes will sear in horror!

“Kids, I’m sorry to tell you that my gay marriage deeply threatens your straight—and putative—marriages. Just felt you should know.”

Felt like I should warn the guys at the coffee shop.

“Hey, you’re gay? Always thought you were straight…” said Mendoza-who-is-not Montalvo (don’t ask…).

I tell them about Wisconsin, that it’s a criminal offense to go get married—if you’re gay—in another state.

Lucía, busy sweeping the floor, is totally uninterested in my sexual orientation—WHAT!—but remarks over her shoulder that “don’t worry, my generation will take care of that.”

Which it will, of course.  Julaine Appling is in her young 60’s—will any girl of Lucía’s age lead the closeted life that Appling has? Not likely.

There was a time when, “I’m” and “gay,” were the two hardest words in the language to put together. But practice has made it easy: I’ve told bosses, parents, strangers that I’m gay. And now, I’m gonna tell the public about it. In twenty states—including Wisconsin—gay couples have gone to court to challenge the state amendments that invalidates their marriages.

I bought an apartment next to Raf’s parents, so that someone could live there and look after them. And I asked the notary, who described me in the deed, if it was really true that I was soltero, or single. Legally, yes, he said, according to the laws of Puerto Rico. He then went home, tossed and turned all night, and called the bar association the next day. They had been waiting for the call….

“Hey, I’m a footnote in the legal history of Puerto Rico,” I ran around telling everybody. I and Raf had become the first reference legally to a same-sex marriage in a legal document in Puerto Rico. Being a footnote feels great—try it sometime…

So why not be a paragraph?

Newhouse versus the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico!

Like it?

Nine Cowards

OK—I admit it. I’ve spent most of the morning contemplating this one sentence, drawn from The New York Times:

In the trial court, the state had argued that restricting marriage to a man and a woman would make heterosexual couples act more responsibly when they had sex.

The state is Utah, which for two brief weeks allowed—well, was forced to allow—1,300 same sex couples to marry. In a state that is heavily Mormon, that didn’t sit well with the majority of residents, and the attorney general of the state lost no time getting up to the US Court of Appeals for the 10^th Circuit. And they said, “no dice—we’re not giving you a stay until you can appeal.” And why? Here’s The Salt Lake Tribune:

According to the order, the state failed to demonstrate it was suffering "irreparable harm" as a result of the legalization of same-sex marriage and also failed to show it had a "significant likelihood" of prevailing in its appeal to the circuit court.

Right—that’s pretty clear. So then the state, desperate to get the ruling on hold, went to the Supreme Court. Nor is that word “desperate” only mine: google “Utah desperate” and you get the following Christian Science Monitor headline:

Utah, growing desperate, to ask Supreme Court to halt gay marriages

The request went to Sonia Sotomayor, who oversees the 10^th court. And she had the choice to rule on it alone, or give it to the entire court. And what did she do? Turfed it to the entire court. And they, late last week, finally gave Utah what it wanted. So for less than 20 days same sex marriage was legal.

And then it wasn’t.

In the process of getting to the Supreme Court, Utah dropped its insane contention that barring same sex marriage would force heterosexual couples to “act more responsibly when having sex.” Instead, according to The New York Times, they fell back on the old argument: children do better when raised in father / mother household.

What was the problem? Well, here’s the Times itself:

 Lawyers for the couples challenging Utah’s ban on same-sex marriage responded that the assertion “is not true.” For evidence, they cited “the scientific consensus of every national health care organization charged with the welfare of children and adolescents,” and listed nine such groups. The view of the groups, the challengers said, “based on a significant and well-respected body of current research, is that children and adolescents raised by same-sex parents, with all things being equal, are as well-adjusted as children raised by opposite-sex couples.”

Utah responded that it would not be swayed by “politically correct trade associations,” referring to, among others, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association. “We are not ruled by experts,” the state’s brief said.

OK—I agree with the last line….

Finally, Utah cooked up one last argument. The Supreme Court had ruled in favor of diversity in deciding who could attend public universities, and so they announced something called “gender diversity.” Scratching your head? A man and a woman—that’s diverse. Two guys or two women? Not so much.

The three arguments are breathtaking in their absurdity. But does it surprise me? Of course not—the state is hardly going to come out and say the truth, which is that the idea of two men or women married is repugnant to them. But what does bug me? Well, here are the first two sentences of the Times’s article:

The Supreme Court’s order last week halting same-sex marriages in Utah was two sentences long. It was provisional and cryptic, and it added nothing to the available information on where the Supreme Court stands on the momentous question of whether there is a constitutional right to same-sex marriage.

Well, who am I to tackle the Times, and especially Adam Liptak, the author of the article? But I think this stay tells us a lot about the Supreme Court. And tells us that the court, like Utah, is also desperate. They know perfectly well that all of the states who have passed laws defining marriage as between a woman and a man have disenfranchised five to ten percent of the population. They know perfectly well that history will find it amazing that we could have believed in such a thing. They know that all but the most conservative of them would have to find the defense of marriage laws unconstitutional.

In fact, the “victories” in June were anything but. What did the court do? Nothing—they ruled on technicalities. And they’ll do it again—because the 10^th Court of Appeals put it pretty plainly: Utah didn’t have “a ‘significant likelihood’ of prevailing in its appeal to the circuit court.”

They’re buying time. But here’s the question: how will they get out of it this time?