Letters to the Editor
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Either you're equal or you aren't
And I would appreciate any direct quotes from him against the queer community. Also, when it comes to marriage, are you talking about the rights-and-privileges that would be covered under civil unions, or the word?
If civil unions are the same thing as marriages, I assume you'd have no problem with you or your heterosexual loved ones being forced to get one instead of marriage, Ktwdawg? And if the only problem really was "the word" -- and "the word", apparently, is so meaningless that LGBT people shouldn't require it -- then how childish is it of bigots to want to keep it from others? It's just a word, after all, right? So who are the people in that scenario who really need to grow up and get over it?
Here's a quote, which is included in an insightful article by the Reverend Irene Monroe on advocate.com:
“I was reminded that it is my obligation not only as an elected official in a pluralistic society, but also as a Christian, to remain open to the possibility that my unwillingness to support gay marriage is misguided,” Obama wrote in his recent memoir, The Audacity of Hope.
But Obama’s audacity is not only his unwillingness to support the issue, but also his misunderstanding and misuse of the term “gay marriage.” The terminology “gay marriage” not only stigmatizes and stymies our efforts for marriage equality, but it also suggests that LGBT people’s marriages are or would be wholly different from those of heterosexuals, thus altering its landscape, if not annihilating the institution of marriage entirely.
But Obama’s remarks in a recent interview with Tim Russert on NBC’s Meet the Press spoke somewhat encouragingly about granting LGBTQ couples not marriage equality but certainly civil union rights.
However, having lived outside of America during its turbulent decades of the Jim Crow era and legal segregation, Obama may not know on a visceral and lived experienced level what those decades had been like for African-Americans.
But he ought to know, as a civil rights attorney, that granting LGBTQ Americans only the right to civil unions violates our full constitutional right as well as reinstitutionalizes the 1896 U.S. Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson. As a result of that decision, the “separate but equal” doctrine became the rule of law until it was struck down in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision.
However, Obama doesn’t understand that regardless of one’s gender expression or sexual orientation, we want equal status to be institutionalized within our marriages as well.