Federal Marriage Amendment

On Friday night I attended Frozen at the Studio theatre around the block from my house. Afterwards my girlfriend and I went to the Playbill Café for a couple of drinks. As it turned out the Playbill was a gay bar. Kristin and I found ourselves talking politics, when the man sitting next to her leaned over and shared his views of George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld. His name was Andy and he did not have the most positive things to say about them. As we continued to talk, he shared that he was a staffer for a member of congress. His boss had asked him what his views were on the Federal Marriage Amendment (FMA), which would amend the constitution to allow marriage only between a man and a woman. He told his boss that he had paid his taxes his entire life and saw absolutely no reason that he should be treated as a second-class citizen. A month later, his boss came back to him and told him that he was right.

Earlier that week, I had participated in a Youth Lobby Day on the Federal Marriage Amendment. Along with an intern at the Human Rights Campaign, I visited staffers for our Senators Voinovich and DeWine. DeWine, who is a close ally in my Darfur work, is a co-sponsor of the FMA and consequently an opponent of our stance. Voinovich on the other hand, had no stance, nor, his staffer said, had they even read the amendment. In both meetings we discussed how this amendment would reverse a long trend of amendments expanding rights to citizens. DeWine’s staffer (Ben Franklin – from the UK) explained that the Amendment would not make Gay Marriage illegal, but it would prevent Judges from ruling on gay marriage cases, leaving the power to determine the legality of particular kinds of marriage to the states. I glanced back at the language of the Amendment and realized that if you read it backwards after translating it into Aramaic that was exactly what it said.

I told them stories of my family and friends who would be affected by this amendment and told them stories of how they had already been affected by living in a homophobic society already filled with discrimination and stigma. Andy, from the Playbill, later told me about how gay bars in the eighties and early nineties couldn’t have windows, and how the police would occasionally raid them and arrest everyone. To this day, Andy said he had a record for simply going to the bar. As we talked I could tell he had a lot of resentment and frustration with the system. He was also cynical about the American people. Given his experiences who could blame him? The current legislation does nothing more than exacerbate his wounds.

How should we view the FMA? It can be viewed as a legitimate threat to the expansion of civil rights to the GLBT community. But it can also be viewed as a purely reactionary, panicky, doomed piece of Legislation aimed at stemming the expansion of rights that is already occurring. While it is probably a mixture of both, I would like to believe in the latter. I have faith in the American community. I believe that we are all committed to the expansion of human rights. As the gay community becomes more visible, and people find themselves faced with the reality of their neighbors, their friends, and their family members proudly stating their orientation, and then sadly sharing the limitations they have in entering into a loving commitment with their partners, views will change. I believe that one day a Federal Marriage Amendment will pass through congress that does not limit our love for one another, but that enables it to grow, and grow, and grow.