Gay Marriage to Alfred: Your Thoughts

thoughts

many xps to donna rouge:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xxpd3Ye0zA

so whom am I marrying?

everyone, I guess

polyanamorylicious

(a rejected Black Album track)

alfred what kind of health benefits package does your employer offer for spouses

There isn't a playwright in the world who could make me believe this would happen between two adult people. Goodbye, Alfred.

alfred what kind of health benefits package does your employer offer for spouses

Let's civil unionize and reap the benefits. My hair looks a lot like yours these days.

DOMA not looking good, according to TPM. The Most Important Man in America among the skeptics.

But of course.

http://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-prn1/45231_10151506634593917_269394076_n.jpg

ILX in pursuit of Alfred

http://www.flushfido.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/seven-chances-brides1.jpg

A high-school friend posted a pink-on-red ampersand as his FB profile pic. I wasn't sure whether that was supposed to be some kind of separate-but-not-equal sentiment or what.

exit pursued by ILX

xp Wait, that doesn't even make sense. Maybe he's a bisexual polygamist.

ALFRED
ALREADY
GAY
MARRIED.

http://lightbox.time.com/2013/03/28/behind-the-covers-portraits-of-the-gay-marriage-revolution-by-peter-hapak/

the juxtaposition of the first pairing in the photoessay being two black women with the images chosen for the cover really have me taken aback

it's a little like, how many steps away from "straight, white person" are you allowed to be before you are no longer used as "the example"?

Michael Jackson?

Gay marriage to Maggie Gallagher: your thoughts

“Right now, it’s ‘cool’ to be pro-gay marriage. In ten years, it will be what the old folks think,” she offered hopefully.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_1pcqmhvLE

Dem senators against s-s marriage in 2004!

http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/03/28/how-the-democrats-have-evolved/

also, Sullivan otm:

The Clintons have always been phonies and opportunists and for Bill Clinton to proclaim the sanctity of marriage and sign DOMA while cigar-fucking his intern tells you a lot about him. On no issue were they as shameless as on this one – portraying themselves as civil rights advocates while kicking those of us fighting for equality squarely in the groin.

yeah sullivan certainly didn't have any bad ideas in 2004

ooops, I'M INVALIDATED

also, Greenwald:

It really is a bit shocking how quickly gay marriage transformed from being a fringe, politically toxic position just a few years ago to a virtual piety that must be affirmed in decent company. Whenever I write or speak about any of the issues on which I focus, I always emphasize that a posture of defeatism - which is a form of learned impotence: a belief that meaningful change is impossible - is misguided. This demonstrates why that is true: even the most ossified biases and entrenched institutional injustices can be subverted - if the necessary passion and will are summoned and the right strategies found.

I don't want to overstate the lesson here. There are reasons why such radical change on this issue is easier than on many others. Social issues don't threaten entrenched ruling interests: allowing same-sex couples to marry doesn't undermine oligarchs, the National Security State, or the wildly unequal distribution of financial and political power. Indeed, many of those ruling interests, led by Wall Street and other assorted plutocrats (including Obama's donor base), became the most devoted advocates for LGBT equality. If anything, one could say that the shift on this issue has been more institution-affirming than institution-subverting: the campaign to overturn "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" continually glorified and even fetishized military service, while gay marriage revitalizes a traditional institution - marriage - that heterosexuals have been in the process of killing with whimsical weddings, impetuous divorces, and serial new spouses (as Rush Limbaugh might put it: I'd like you to meet my fourth wife). And these changes are taking a once marginalized and culturally independent community and fully integrating it into mainstream society, thus making that community invested in conventional societal institutions.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/26/gay-marriage-supreme-court-defeatism

That's a pretty hard rhetorical U-turn between those twp p's there.

no, the achievability of a goal has very little to do with how "revolutionary" it is.

No, he's saying "attainable goals are meaningless because they only bolster the enslaving power of the establishment, man."

"But seriously, don't be impotent."

no, THAT attainable goal bolsters the establishment.

Dissents!

i really liked this (hard-hard-left) article

Queers are are being laid off, screwed over, left without health care, struggle to keep their jobs in an economy that exploits them, and in general are having a hard time staying afloat - much like millions of straight people. What any success around gay marriage will do is to reinforce the idea, already popular amongst straights, that marriage will make everything okay. But, as I’ve repeatedly pointed out, there’s no point to marriage if neither one of you has healthcare and if, under Obamacare, you’re still compelled to shop around for it. There's no point to marriage if your chances of getting a job are dimmer every day, and there's no point to marriage if you can be fired at will, without recourse, for any reason, including sexual orientation and gender identity, because you live in an at-will state like Illinois - which, by the way, is poised to "win" gay marriage any day now.

http://www.yasminnair.net/content/gay-marriages-economic-underside

Same sex marriage has been a textbook lesson in how little 'd' democratic politics work. When most voters were against it, even the the sympathetic politicians who gave secret encouragement to activists made equivocal statements in public that gave their opponents little leverage. It was up to activists to fight the uphill battle and change voters' minds. When the public opinion shifted sufficiently the politicians publically shifted along with it. The LGBT community has had some very smart, very committed and amazingly effective activists. They've done A+ work so far.

that Nair piece sez all the important things.

Most professional LGBT activists can go fuck a duck.

They'll probably opt instead for their husbands and wives.

yeah i think i agree with yasmin nair's take on this. xp

So-called ' insider baseball' professional activists often lead hopelessly narrow and work-suffocated lives. They sometimes compensate for this awful existance by redefining it as membership in the world's most exclusive and powerful tribe. They also tend to be pragmatic to the point of amorality. But there are many forms of activism and professionals are not the most representative ones.

speaking of professional lgbt activism and yasmin nair, this is pretty crazy:

http://yasminnair.net/content/fuck-love

there is no hell like that of angry, rich, gays who have waited their entire lives for the kind of respectability that would be the cherry on their neoliberal wedding cake.

The idea that the young, white, gay male community (which serves as, by and large, its magazine cover face) is, but for that one specific social-issue sticking point, perhaps one of the most reactionary demographics out there is totally nothing new. I don't see that marriage is going to radically change that.

I reflexively dislike HRC and have said so many years, and reading Linda Hershman's Victory at the moment (I recommend it) doesnt help, but can someone post a couple of links to comprehensive articles attacking its work?

That Yasmin Nair article is just awful imo. Gay marriage isnt a worthy cause because the health care system is still broken and rich neoliberal gays campaigned for it. huh?

Let them eat (wedding) cake!

That Yasmin Nair article is just awful imo. Gay marriage isnt a worthy cause because the health care system is still broken and rich neoliberal gays campaigned for it. huh?

― dsb, Friday, March 29, 2013 12:15 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

facepalm

The tone of some of these articles is def "no dessert before vegetables" imo.

What Nair seems to miss in that article is not the big picture of how exploitive the US economy is or how monsterous it is that roughly 50 million have no healthcare, and
she's equally right that putting massive resources into same sex marriage has redirected those resources from other issues, but she overlooks the fact that mainstream acceptance of same sex marriage will have transformative effects in society similar to school desegregation. Desegregation shared the highest priority of the civil rights movement (alongside voting rights) for a good reason. Marriage contradicts the most powerful social stigma against gays by legitimizing what was always the bedrock of its presumed illegitimacy. Symbolism counts for a lot in such issues.

otm

I discovered Hannah Arendt around the time of Lawrence v. Texas. The following passage is right and wrong in ways she could not have anticipated.

I did lol @ this Nair sentence: "In a few months, a final report, on very good paper, will be mailed to me..."

this is a fairly detailed post about how HRC has historically been pretty shitty to transppl:

http://transgriot.blogspot.com/2007/10/why-transgender-community-hates-hrc.html