Lil Miss Hot Mess

If you know me at all well, you know that I’m so over gay marriage.

But if you don’t: Do I think that having a constitutional amendment preventing a particular class of people from accessing a particular privilege is wrong?  Yes.  Do I think that marriage should be the forefront of queer activism?  No.  And don’t even get me started on the whole “separate is inherently unequal” bullshit.

I’m finally catching up on news, and I wanted to share some interesting pieces I’ve been reading today about gay marriage:

• Back to the California voters in 2010: Alex Blaze at the Bilerico Project on the debate about whether to put an initiative on the ballot in 2010, and quotes from the ridiculous rhetoric an organization called Love. Honor. Cherish. — which, hi, despite making me think of Love! Valour! Compassion! is just about the gayest and more boring name ever — that is run, surprise surprise!, by equally boring-looking (mostly) white gay men who apparently have no sense of communications or strategy.  Here is one of their arguments:

Seniors. There are about 4.5 million Californians over 65 years old. Of these, 450,000 are gay or lesbian. In any two-year period, more than 13,000 of those people will die. Thus, if Prop 8 is repealed in 2010, there will be 13,000 more elderly gays and lesbians who will have lived to see their right to marry affirmed by a vote of the people. If we wait until 2012, these men and women will never experience that affirmation. [my emphasis added]

• Prepare to Prevail: A statement issued by the Jordan/Rustin Coalition, API Equality, HONOR PAC and others urging folks to wait until legalized gay marriage is winnable.  Even though I don’t really want to see this come to another vote at any point in the foreseeable future (it just doesn’t make sense in California, given Domestic Partnerships!), I’m grateful for more mainstream organizations putting out a call to slow down, and especially their call to not waste/steal resources from more deserving projects.
• A Look at the Gay Rights Movement Beyond Marriage and the Military and What’s Right With Utah: Lisa Duggan is a brilliant thinker and writer.  The first is her appearance on Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman, and the second is her piece in The Nation about the way the gays and queers in Utah are building a truly broad-based coalition, and advocating for an “Adult Joint Support Declaration” registry as a way of getting around their “Super DOMA,” but which actually offers more possibilities for legal caring relationships than gay marriage.

• Inequality in the Marriage Equality Movement: Amy Sueyoshi’s arguments are similar to Duggan’s and others’, but still worth reading, and she has some good documentation of orgs losing funding because gay marriage isn’t their primary goal.  Also, one thing that she brings forward that I hadn’t considered: it’s not only gay dollars that are being diverted to marriage rather than social services, but also anti-gay dollars (ie. churches that run soup kitchens may divert some of that money to political action).  I’m not sure I’m particularly invested in where that kind of money goes, but in a time of decreased social services across the board, it feels noteworthy.

• Proof: The Gay Marriage Movement Is Draining Resources from Queer Activism: Yasmin Nair’s latest piece on the Bilerico Project, through which I found Sueyoshi’s.  She’s also got a good analysis.

Oh, and as an interesting ongoing source of information about this, I’ve been following Nancy Polikoff’s blog, Beyond (Straight or Gay) Marriage, which is often very legal, but which I find interesting.

Anyway, I wish these viewpoints could be expressed in more mainstream places, and wanted to do my part to put them out there!