Same sex marriage is one of the most controversial social issues in the U.S., and has become a central struggle for the gay rights movement. In 2008 California voters passed Proposition 8, banning same-sex marriage shortly after the state’s Supreme Court legalized it. Although a clear setback against homophobia, does marriage equality herald the success of gay rights? Looking at the stalled civil rights movements of the recent past, Heather Tirado Gilligan highlights a self-defeating tendency to equate social justice with middle-class issues. Gilligan argues that though there is understandable preoccupation with the ups and downs of marriage equality, the real question is: What would a truly comprehensive queer rights movement look like, and how does marriage fit into that struggle? Such critical reflection, Gilligan suggests, may make the queer rights struggle the catalyst for a broad-based social justice movement.
On Waiting Out Homophobia
By Heather Tirado Gilligan
OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2009 CONDUCIVE
It’s hard to be a social problem, a truism that’s become particularly personal for queer residents of California. Hearing my life publicly debated, defined by one aspect of my identity, and reified accordingly, took a toll on me last fall. Concurrently covering Proposition 8 as an academic turned trainee radio reporter and freelance journalist only intensified my feelings. I enjoyed an unobstructed, eyewitness view of the ugly struggle over same-sex marriage in California. I suspected, as did most who felt first-hand the fervor of anti-marriage crusaders, that the marriage rights granted by the court would be revoked at the polls. Two weeks before the election, I stood in the midst of a Yes on 8 rally in Sacramento collecting cheerfully homophobic vox populi from anti-gay protestors for a public radio show. Two days after the election, I stood unsurprised in the Castro, taping voices still too shocked to sound sad.
By November 6, I never wanted to hear another debate about same-sex marriage again, a desire that remains distinctly unfulfilled. The state Prop 8 Supreme Court hearing on March 4th was met by protestors on both sides waving signs, standing in front of the jumbotrons set up for real-time viewing of the hearing in front of the court building. The pain was palpable as married couples wept over cardboard blow-ups of their marriage licenses now tainted by the hatred that propelled Prop 8, a hatred on display as Prop 8 supporters cheered the Supreme Court ruling.
Only belatedly, after 1965, did King and other leaders acknowledge the failure of the movement to address the persistent realities of poverty and economic discrimination. – Anthony Badger
The muck of California’s ongoing same-sex marriage fight, especially combined with the policy shifts of the Obama administration, which demurred on campaign promises to repeal discriminatory policies like Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and supported the Defense of Marriage Act in federal court, is depressing.
Yet the delight surrounding the same-sex marriage victories that cropped up in Iowa and Vermont the first week of April 2009 will likely be seen again soon: Governors in New York and New Jersey indicated they would sign legislation legalizing same-sex marriage; meanwhile, New Hampshire has already followed neighbor Vermont in legalizing same-sex marriage. Marriage rights activists are hoping that all of New England will recognize same-sex marriages by the end of the decade, and for each victory, the irrational exuberance over gay rights successes will return. Oft-repeated statistics about a steadily increasing progressive younger generation will indicate once again that the success of gay rights is inevitable. Lost in the celebratory hullabaloo that attends our victories and alternates with the profound despair that surrounds our losses, we will forget to ask an essential question: What will the ultimate success of gay civil rights look like? What is gained in marriage victories, and what problems are left unsolved? In the face of the intense emotions surrounding the gay rights movement, such critical thinking withers, a dangerous tendency in a social justice movement fighting against a profound prejudice, especially one that represents the full spectrum of social diversity in the United States, cutting across race, class, nationality, and gender.
The articles that followed April’s good news for gay rights, such as The American Prospect’s “We’ve Already Won the Battle Over Gay Marriage,” are excellent examples of the unquestioning exuberance surrounding same-sex marriage victories in early April (though we all knew that the dismal setback of California’s Prop 8 ruling was around the corner), and the missed opportunity to think through where the gay rights movement is right now. “Although most conservatives will be loath to admit it,” Paul Waldman wrote in TAP the week that Iowa and Vermont legalized same-sex marriage, “this battle is over, and they have lost.” Waldman drew his optimism in part from the data of pollster Nate Silver, a statistical guru whose predictions about the 2008 presidential elections, frequently more reliable than national polls, won him widespread recognition last year. In May 2009, Silver developed a formula to predict the year of majority voter support for same-sex marriage on a state-by-state basis, beginning with most of New England by the end 2010 and ending with Mississippi in 2024. California, Silver predicts, will see majority support for same-sex marriage by 2010.
The support of the younger generation for same-sex marriage rights is routinely emphasized in such rosy outlooks. In the weeks and months following the passage of Prop 8, I heard the youth-are-more-progressive argument repeated ad nauseam, at dinner parties, charity gatherings I covered for the local gay newspaper, on the bus. After watching the Prop 8 battle unfold, however, nothing seemed inevitable. I’m not sure if Silver’s November 11, 2008 posting on his blog FiveThirtyEight was the origin of this new truism about the progressive inclinations of the next generation, but Silver offers an excellent summary of the argument. “The good news for supporters of marriage equity is that — and there’s no polite way to put this — the older voters aren’t going to be around for all that much longer,” Silver wrote. “They’ll gradually be cycled out and replaced by younger voters who grew up in a more tolerant era.”
How does the fact that we soon will be living in a nation where minorities are the majority affect LGBT rights?
Research based in decades-long projects, however, challenges such happy visions of the future. A recent study conducted at the University of California, Santa Barbara notes that only twenty-five percent of change in attitudes towards same-sex marriage can be attributed to generational change. “Although most Americans are far from tolerant about homosexual relations, their tolerance has grown enormously since 1990. A little over one-quarter of that growth was the result of generational replacement,” write political scientists Alison G. Keleher and Eric R.A.N. Smith in their 2008 paper “Explaining the Growing Support for Gay and Lesbian Equality Since 1990,” casting doubt that an army of enlightened young people will shortly save civil rights for gays.
Public opinion is also consistently volatile on the question of gay rights, particularly after those rights are extended. Opinion shifted after several key victories, with support dropping significantly in 2003, after Massachusetts granted same-sex marriage rights and the Supreme Court struck down anti-sodomy laws in Lawrence v. Texas. According to Gallop, popular support for legalized homosexual sex dropped from 60 percent in 2002 to 50 percent in 2003. The Pew Center points out that 26 states amended their constitutions to ban same-sex marriage after it became legal in Massachusetts. Keleher and Smith also note significant drops in support for gays and lesbians during the first two presidential elections of the new millennium: “Most notably, George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign promised a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage,” they write, “and a number of states experienced initiative campaigns attempting to define marriage as only being between a man and a woman.”
Pew indicates that when rancor subsides, few change their views for the better. Thirty-six percent of Americans supported same-sex marriage in 2003, and thirty-six percent supported it in 2007. On “homosexual relations” (their term for same-sex relationships), Americans remain split, according to Gallop’s most recent annual moral issues poll. Indeed, homosexual relations remain the single most divisive issue in the country, inviting more invective than abortion or doctor assisted suicide.
That’s what we do know; there remain many more problems we’ve yet articulate, never mind address. For example, how does the fact that we soon will be living in a nation where minorities are the majority affect LGBT rights? Given the powerful resources aimed at minority voters by conservative, rich and primarily white institutions such as the Mormon Church in the struggle over Prop 8 in California, this lack of knowledge should give us pause.
What is gained in marriage victories, and what problems are left unsolved?
Prop 8 highlighted the unfortunate fissures that define this country, divides we prefer to treat as unfortunate abstractions until they become inconvenient for us—the well-educated, the rich in cultural capital and or in relative wealth—a tendency that walloped same-sex marriage proponents in my home state. The correlation between levels of education, race, and views on same-sex marriage became clear last fall, and it led to much anger amid little self-reflection in the weeks following the election in California. According to a December 2008 Public Policy Institute of California study, 70 percent of voters with a high school education supported the proposition, as did 63 percent of low-income households. The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education reports that whites hold twice as many bachelor’s degrees as African Americans and three times more than Latinos. In this context, it is unsurprising that 58 percent of African Americans and 61 percent of Latinos supported the measure, as compared to 49 percent of whites.
According to Silver’s model, opposition to same-sex marriage will drop by two points a year in each state. Given the complexities I outline here in support for gay rights, I find it difficult to imagine that states will reach a bare majority of popular support for same-sex marriage at a happily increasing clip. I doubt even more that simple majority support will significantly change the lives of same-sex couples in conservative regions like the South, or in the low-income and minority enclaves that are consistently a part of our national population.
Support for same-sex marriage varies widely by region, and though we reflexively think of the LGBT population as living in urban areas, the question of gays and lesbians in such regional predicaments should concern us deeply. According to data from the last census, 99.3 percent of counties in the United States house same-sex couples. The census data, analyzed by the Williams Institute at UCLA’s Law School, revealed several surprises about gay and lesbian life in the United States. The fact that Mississippi, slated last for same-sex marriage legalization, is home to the largest number of same-sex couples with children according to the Williams Institute, is a heartbreaking piece of knowledge in this context.
I do not intend to throw a wet blanket on recent civil rights successes. I mean instead to make a point: We supporters of gay rights cannot ignore the segments of the population routinely left behind by civil rights movements, those who are gay and also poor, and gay and also a racial or ethnic minority, or gay and forced for economic or other reasons to reside in a particularly homophobic region of the country. This mistake has been made over and again by social movements. “Only belatedly, after 1965, did King and other leaders acknowledge the failure of the movement to address the persistent realities of poverty and economic discrimination,” historian Anthony Badger recently wrote. The string of major legislative victories for civil rights won in the 1960s, according to William Julius Wilson in The Declining Significance of Race, were “particularly relevant to the growing middle class that was not concerned about the day-to-day problems of economic survival…this legislation did not sufficiently address the unique problems…confronting [poor] blacks.” The other major rights movement of the twentieth century, women’s rights, arguably suffered from a similar neglect of women who were neither white nor middle class. “For the most part, only middle-class women are able to protest about this purely sexist oppression; underprivileged women are preoccupied with racist and economic oppression,” wrote Maren Lockwood Carden in her 1977 report for the Ford Foundation, “Feminism in the mid-1970s.” Carden continues: “In the face of day-to-day problems of survival, self-fulfillment is irrelevant, and, while they are aware of sex discrimination (for example, in employment), they worry much more about unemployment, low pay, the welfare system, or sub-standard housing. It is logical, therefore, that they should attack their own most pressing problems by creating their own organizations[.]”
Perhaps, in the struggle for gay civil rights, which today carries so much progressive momentum, we can develop a social justice program that addresses the larger problems of our community.
I would suggest that the failure to conceive of civil rights as a broad-based rather than middle-class movement contributed to the petering out of these monumental, yet unfinished, struggles. Legal victories typically provide a level of comfort for the middle class and above; thus while sexism and racism still exist, they are defining and profoundly limiting life factors primarily for poorer citizens. Once middle-class rights were largely satisfied, civil rights movements ceased to create change. Incidents of race and gender wage gaps continue to exist side by side with segregation by race as well as class, disproportionate imprisonment rates and maps of million dollar blocks: examples of discrimination so commonplace it is almost cliché to mention them. Thus even the most privileged women and people of color live in a half-baked state of success, past apartheid, still faced with inequality, and possessing little impetus to restart a stalled movement. Given the current emphasis of gay civil rights on the same types of legislative victories that defined the struggles for women’s rights and African American rights, it is all too easy to imagines ourselves in the same position in 2024, if we manage to coast there on a slightly increasing population of more progressive young people rather than a concerted effort to change minds.
Another way to put this is that legislative triumphs and cultural victories are not interchangeable, and given the depth of feeling that structures social expectations around gender and sexuality, this seems to be a particularly important point for gays and lesbians. Same-sex marriage may be legal in Alabama in 2023, in other words, but I doubt I would feel safe as an out lesbian passing through that state despite the legislative success, and I would continue to feel a profound empathy and fear for the out gay people who had to live there. Perhaps, in the struggle for gay civil rights, which today carries so much progressive momentum, we can develop a social justice program that addresses the larger problems of our community. In doing so, we create a movement that reaches out into the segments of the population left behind by other struggles for civil rights, and we also at least attempt to persuade communities resistant to LGBT rights that their beliefs are unjust. The work in front of us is immense, and to suggest otherwise might doom us to a movement unfinished.
I understand the feeling behind arguments attending our significant successes in gay rights. We all want to believe that the day of the gay is nigh; I’m tired too, of thwarted hope, the never-ending discussion, and the ugliness of our cultural conversations. But hastening to predictions of gay liberation by focusing narrowly on the rights of one segment of the population may mean that no end’s in sight.
Copyright ©2009 Conducive. All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission from CONDUCIVEMAG.COM
