Date: 02 Jun 96 14:57:13 EDT
From: Martha Barnette <75300.3140@CompuServe.COM>
Subject: Re: marriage editorial

Here's the slightly updated version of my Courier-Journal op-ed.  Please
feel free to post anywhere.  I'm encouraging balky letter-writers to just
print out the damn thing, scrawl "I AGREE, THIS LEGISLATION IS IDIOTIC!!!"
on it and send to Clinton et al.
 
Cheers!
 
From the Louisville Courier-Journal (Kentucky's largest statewide newspaper)
 
Ms. Barnette, formerly a member of The Louisville Times reporting staff and
a former Courier-Journal editorial writer, is a writer in Louisville.
 
 
       Like most folks, I grew up dreaming that I'd meet and marry the love
of my life.  Like anyone in love, I marvel at my good fortune at finding that
person more than seven years ago.
        But we still can't wed.  And it's time for fair-minded Kentuckians to
consider the injustice of preventing gay couples like ourselves from marrying.
        Understand, first of all, that I'm not talking about the religious
institution of "holy matrimony" here.  I'm talking about the civil institution
of marriage, through which the government provides a host of legal rights to
some adult couples, but denies them to others.
        Backed by religious extremists, Republican congressmen this month
introduced federal legislation to ensure that people like us will never have
"equal protection under the law."  What they don't want you to think about,
however, is that preventing us from marrying is not only mean-spirited and
hypocritical, it's downright anti-family.  Here's why:
        The instant the ink dries on a marriage license, straight couples take
for granted at least 150 legal rights, including the right to consent to
surgery for a seriously ill partner, to authorize an autopsy, to carry out a
partner's wishes for burial, and to refuse to testify against one's spouse in
court.
        Every time my partner and I travel in a car, we carry with us a fear
that married couples never do:  If one of us is seriously injured in a wreck,
the other may be barred from her intensive-care room -- perhaps from her
deathbed -- because technically, we're not "family."
        Or imagine your spouse being whisked away by government officials and
shipped out of the country forever, because in the eyes of the law, you're
nothing more than strangers.  This happens to thousands of gay couples every
year.  In fact, it happened to me:  Years ago a Brazilian woman and I planned
to spend our lives together.  But her visa expired, and she was immediately
deported.  That our own government routinely tears apart gay couples and their
families this way is bewilderingly cruel and, let me assure you,
heartbreaking.
        I'm astonished at how many people assume that my partner and I already
have the same rights as married couples.  Some figure that because we've been
together more than seven years, we must be married under "common law," but
that applies only to straight couples. Others think a "commitment ceremony"
does the trick, but such ceremonies carry absolutely no legal weight.  This
means, among other things, that if I die tomorrow, my partner won't get a day
of bereavement leave from work, and could face a court challenge to her
inheritance that married partners need never worry about.
        Some argue we shouldn't "tamper with" the fundamental building block
of society called marriage.  But marriage has already been evolving and
changing over the years, and each time for the better.
        Not that long ago, marriage laws declared wives to be their husband's
property; men could even rape their wives with impunity. Similarly, slaves
were once prohibited from marrying -- a cruelty custom-designed to ease the
conscience of Christian slave owners, who could then sell off family members
one by one, confident they hadn't violated the Biblical injunction not to "put
asunder" married couples.
        Less than 30 years ago, laws in 16 states prohibited interracial
couples from marrying -- laws which would have invalidated, for starters, the
interracial marriages of former Republican presidential candidates Phil Gramm
and Alan Keyes.
        If same-gender marriage were legal, churches would never be compelled
to perform such ceremonies.  Rightly so. We're a nation founded on respect for
religious diversity, and churches should have the right to discriminate within
their own congregations against gay people -- or women, for that matter.
        But many denominations already bless gay marriages, including
Unitarians, Reform Jews, Zen Buddhists, the Metropolitan Community Church, as
well as various congregations of Episcopalians, American Baptists, Methodists,
Evangelical Lutherans, Mennonites, and the United Church of Christ.  Somebody
please tell me:  Why should some people's religious beliefs have precedence
over other people's religious beliefs when it comes to a matter of a civil
contract between consenting adults?
        Religious ceremonies aside, heterosexual couples always have the
option of being married by a justice of the peace.  Gay couples don't, and as
a landmark Hawaii Supreme Court decision is expected to show, that amounts to
unjust discrimination by a government supposed to represent all its citizens.
        Some insist that the special rights that married heterosexuals enjoy
are designed to provide a stable unit for raising children.  Fine. So why
allow infertile couples to wed?  Should Bob Dole, Newt Gingrich, and others
whose current marriages have produced no offspring turn in their marriage
licenses, since obviously they don't need them?
        A word about gay parents:  The other day I heard Ann Landers tell a
radio interviewer she supports "some sort" of legal recognition for gay
couples, but not "marriage" per se.  In the next breath, though, she
volunteered that gay couples absolutely should be allowed to adopt,
 because she personally knows many gay parents doing a wonderful job of
raising their kids.
        What she apparently doesn't understand is that preventing all those
wonderful gay parents from marrying hurts those kids:  Consider the lesbian
whose health insurance won't cover her partner's toddler because they're not
married.  Or the boy uprooted from the only home he's ever known because his
biological parent died and the gay partner can't adopt him.
        Astoundingly, demagogues on the right act as if it's their marriages
and their relationships, that are under attack.  The sponsors of this bill
(one of whom is so enthusiastic about marriage he's been married three times)
have even dubbed this bill the "Defense of Marriage Act." What possible harm
does it do to your marriage if the couple next door can wed?
        Clearly, they find it easier to make political hay by scapegoating
people like me rather than tackle real threats to American families -- the
sorry divorce rate, for example, or deadbeat dads, or the fact that nearly all
child molestation is perpetrated upon little girls by their heterosexual male
relatives.
 
In other words, they don't want fair-minded folks to consider the facts.
 
But I hope you will.