October 5, 2008

A lot of tears were shed shortly after 10am PT on May 26, 2009 – here’s one news report which includes my wife, Moya Watson, mentioning that she wept on the NBC evening news, here’s an AP article that quoted me while I was wiping away tears.

Now that we’ve used up a box of tissues, I’m getting a bit tired of the insults thrown at California despite the disappointing cowardly, and, yes, shameful ruling. I see a lot of hope and momentum and cause for optimism partially because California still provides more legal protection for GLBT couples than most states.  Despite the tears this week, here we were in October 2008 talking with Michael Tomasky about worry that our marriage would be invalidated … and it wasn’t.

Think about the 4 states in 6 weeks, and then try on this tasty tidbit from Justice Moreno, “The rule the majority crafts … places at risk the state constitutional rights of all disfavored minorites.”  It’s shameful that more of the justices didn’t concur with him, but at least it wasn’t 7-0.  I highly recommend reading Moreno’s entire opinion (PDF – Moreno’s opinion starts on page 151).  It’ll make you feel good.

Mark Morford writes, “Sorry, enemies of gay marriage. Prop 8 or no, you’ve already lost.”

The Daily Kos points out some of the positive parts on page 36 of the decision:

Today, the court unanimously upheld the substantive fundamental right.  Liberal to conservative, they all now accept it.  They construed Prop 8 as narrowly as possible: as a initiative that addressed what we would label these relationships that we normally call marriage.  The voters said that we can’t call these relationships “marriage” when they involve same-sex couples.  That’s an insult to gays and lesbians and I hope and believe that it will not last.  But note what this does not say.

I disagree with Andrew Sullivan’s assertion that the ruling was “the right call,” and I appreciate his optimism that …

It would have been equally dreadful if those couples lawfully wed were subsequently forced into divorce by the court. And these married couples and their families and children will now become the focus of the debate in California, as they should be. They are the evidence that we are right: that extending the blessings and responsibilities of full family life to gay men and lesbians is a good and conservative and integrating thing. We need now to put these families forward as our core argument. Their lives are our best case. Like mixed-race married couples in another era, they will show that there is nothing to fear here and much to celebrate.

A legal writer for Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish (at The Atlantic) argues that the decision further solidifies gay rights:

It appears that this is a blockbuster pro-gay-rights decision, restricting the effect of Prop 8 to the effect of removing the designation of gay civil unions as “marriage,” but upholding all equal rights previously declared by the Court; and, suggesting that if the opponents of gay rights were to try to restrict equal union rights for gays by constitutional change, such change would be an Amendment (not a revision) and thus would be procedurally much more difficult to accomplish.

Being able to lay claim to the word “marriage” is important, but in all other respects this appears to be a spectacular decision in favor of gay rights.

The word “marriage” is very important, and I plan to take up this cause and, like Dan Savage suggests, show how my marriage is doing no harm and is, in fact, doing a lot of good.

The anti-gay bigots said before the decision that they wanted Prop 8 upheld and they weren’t concerned about the 18K gay couples who wed while same-sex marriage was briefly legal in CA. That exposes their fundamental dishonesty. If they believe, as they claimed during the campaign, that married same-sex couples are a threat to the family, a threat to children, an invitation to hurricanes and earthquakes and wildfires, and that the existence of married gay couples somehow requires homosexuality to be taught in schools, how can they be indifferent to 18K married gay couples rattling around the state? Won’t all those bad things still happen?

(Related side note: I’m completely intrigued – and I know many think this is a horrible move – by Bush administration solicitor general Ted Olson taking up the cause in federal court.)

I’m still angrysad about the decision, and I’ve started to feel that my membership in the California Supreme Court certified special class of 18,000 married couples can be a powerful spot instead of an awkward angrysad part of a small minority.  Now I want some membership schwag.  I’m thinking of gold-embossing a copy of our October 2008 marriage certificate and putting it on t-shirts.  Perhaps my membership in the certified special class of 18,000 can help me inspire some Yes on 8 voters to also vote Yes in 2010 on the proposition to legalize marriage equality and undo the harm of Prop 8.

I also believe, as does my wife, Moya, that marriage will and should eventually be downsized to a religious word and what we now consider to be legal civil marriage should instead be a legal civil union for all couples with marriages left to religion.

With ads including gay/lesbian couples, pun intended, coming out now (unlike the advertising during the No on Prop 8 campaign which specifically excluded gay/lesbian couples), and hopefully more people like myself going out and introducing ourselves to Yes on 8 voters, maybe they won’t be so afraid of us and maybe they’ll see we’re not so unlike them.

Ruben and Hector (30 seconds)

Frances and Cynthia (30 seconds)

Kate Kendell: Tell your story and NoDumbQuestions.org will show you how to do it. (2 minutes)

For anyone who voted Yes on 8 and is planning to vote No on the marriage equality proposition next year, I’m still working out my anger before I come to meet you with a more friendly tone, so, for now, as Lily Allen sings, Fuck you very much for voting to hurt my family:

President Obama played dumb last night when he was in Beverly Hills raising money and made the LGBT community the butt of his joke. As the NY Times blog The Caucus reports:

A gaggle of sign-waving protestors milled around outside The Beverly Hilton, the sprawling hotel on Wilshire Boulevard. They must have caught the president’s eye when he arrived at the hotel from an earlier stop in Las Vegas because he relayed one of their messages to the crowd.

“One of them said, “Obama keep your promise,’ ” the president said. “I thought that’s fair. I don’t know which promise he was talking about.”

The people in the audience – who paid $30,400 per couple to attend – laughed as they ate a dinner of roasted tenderloin, grilled organic chicken and sun choke rosemary mashed potatoes.

That “gaggle” of sign-waving protestors was a couple hundred people asking President Obama to live up to his promise to repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.

Outside, Lt Dan Choi spoke at the protest, saying, “Love is so worth it:”

I now belong to a “special” group of approximately 18,000 who are married in the state of California even though the constitution does not allow us to be married.  As Ana Marie Cox tweeted:

“CA Supreme Court follows People vs. KFC precedent: no more gay marriage except for 18,000 who already used coupon.” (via @pourmecoffee)

I know there are probably many good logical spins to explain how/why a court who declared us a suspect class has now upheld discrimination against us, but I do not get it. Page 7 of the opinion is no comfort that they even meant anything  they wrote a year ago:

Nor does Proposition 8 fundamentally alter the meaning and substance of state constitutional equal protection principles as articulated in that opinion. Instead, the measure carves out a narrow and limited exception to these state constitutional rights, reserving the official designation of the term “marriage” for the union of opposite-sex couples as a matter of state constitutional law, but leaving undisturbed all of the other extremely significant substantive aspects of a same-sex couple’s state constitutional right to establish an officially recognized and protected family relationship and the guarantee of equal protection of the laws.

This sounds like an awfully thin curtain of one word dividing first class citizens from second class citizens. So my family has the right to a recognized and protected relationship, but the word, when clearly words matter, is solely reserved for opposite-sex couples, even though that word has clear advantages and rights that are being denied to same-sex couples.

At least Justice Moreno included a piece of Varnum v. Brien (Iowa 2009) 763 N. W.2d 862,877 as the introduction to his opinion:

[T]he ‘absolute equity of all’ persons before the law [is] ‘the very foundation principle of our government.’

My entry into a special class

Lucy announced this week, on walk home from school, “I want to be a scientist when I grow up.”  I tried to respond with calm and support and only imagined myself jumping up and down and cheering.

She's been afraid to lift her legs off the ground while the bike is moving, but shortly after this photo was taken she did it and lifted her legs up and floated. Bravery! Courage!

She can be just about anything she wants, but I have a soft spot of extra enthusiasm for girls wanting to be scientists, and also a strict promise to myself to try not to require it of her or overly emphasize it.  Since this announcement she’s started describing some specific things (maybe she’s done this before and I only recently noticed) as scientist toys or scientist books or scientist play.  And, oh,  don’t I want to hold onto this confidence and desire and interest she has and spread it out amongst her whole life like soft butter on a pancake.

"C'mon, let's go find the puppies!"

My grandma was a chemist and also a high school math teacher

My grandma spent most of her working life as a teacher, usually teaching high school math, but she didn’t enjoy teaching.  She felt it was the only job she could get despite her education (multiple degrees) and experience in the early 1930’s.  I heard many stories about how little she was paid compared with her male colleagues who had less education and experience than her.  After she finished grad school she couldn’t find a job except as a teacher.  When she worked as a teacher she didn’t make enough money to afford her own housing and had to live at home with her parents.  The school district was paid money from the state for the schools and wages for teachers were based on their numbers of degrees, amount of education, and years of experience.  The school district got more money for my grandma because she made multiple college degrees.  They discriminated against her.  They took most of the pay intended for her and, because she was a woman, gave most of her pay to her male colleagues.  Her dad (my great-grandfather) fought back.  He got on the school board in their town in Georgia to get equal pay for his daughter and partially succeeded.  For fighting for his daughter’s equal pay, my great-grandfather is my hero.

When she moved from Georgia to San Francisco in the 1930’s she got a job as a chemist, one of her academic loves along with math, and lived on Russian Hill and worked at 5th/Market.  She used to tell me stories of spice factories south of market, and, reminding me of Mark Twain, of wearing a fur coat in the cold summer, and using her government gas rations to take drives out of the city during the war.  She never liked cold weather.  She eventually lived in Modesto for much of her life where the weather better suited her.

She went back to teaching in Modesto and retired from teaching in the early 1980’s.  While going through a large pile of photos and documents of hers I found her “Life Diploma” and Secondary Credential which represent, to me, her effort to do her absolute best given the circumstances and time she had to live in. Still, in Modesto, as a teacher, she told me stories of how she was paid less then her male colleagues who had equal or less experience and education.

CA Board of Education Life Diploma 1963

CA Board of Education Secondary Credential 1966

My grandma and me, Easter 1977

I read David Leonhardt’s interview with Obama in the April 28, 2009 NY Times magazine and was immediately reminded of my late grandma (Harriet Rasaka) when I read Obama’s answer to the question, “Would you also encourage men to become more comfortable working in fields that they traditionally have not? I mean, nursing is a very well-paying field. There’s a shortage there.”

THE PRESIDENT: I mean, nursing, teaching are all areas where we need more men. I’ve always said if we can get more men in the classroom, particularly in inner cities where a lot of young people don’t have fathers, that could be of enormous benefit.

Now, as you and I both know, in a lot of those fields they have been underpaid because they were predominantly women’s fields. And so part of what we have to do is to recognize that women are just as likely to be the primary bread earner, if not more likely, than men are today. As a consequence, eliminating the pay gap between men and women, and the pay gap between fields, becomes critically important. And we’ve already taken action, for example, with the Lilly Ledbetter bill (6) to try to move in that direction.

I think that if you start seeing nursing pay better and teaching pay better, and some of these other professions, you’re going to see more men in those fields, although there’s a little bit of a chicken and an egg — if you start getting more men in those fields, then the stereotypes about this being a woman’s field and all the gender stereotypes that arise out of thinking that somehow they’re not the primary breadwinner, those stereotypes start being whittled away.

The last time I saw her, she won this game of Tri-ominoes

For all of my life so far I had the best gift anyone has ever given me: unwavering, continuous, perfectly relentless, dependable, unconditional, gracious support and love.  This helped me grow and develop a sense of humor and a smidgen of kindness and a spot of generosity.  I strive to pass on a similar gift.

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.

- Walt Whitman

The death of my dear grandma is heart-breaking gut-wrenching shoulder-tightening and excruciating hurt.

That’s what San Francisco Deputy City Attorney Therese Stewart said today during the Prop 8 oral arguments at the California Supreme Court.  I love that quote.  Every time I read it I think of Lucy’s last birthday party with this castle that our friend Fred built.  A lot of Prop 8, for me, is about protecting my family, and particularly protecting my kid (which is what marriage is about).

This morning we took a much longer walk to get to preschool than usual.  We were avoiding the protests at the state building.  Lucy’s preschool is in the same state building as the California supreme court.  Usually we’d walk right up the steps where the protest was.  Today we took a wide berth and walked a block away around and through the other entrance.  Lucy wanted to know why we got off the streetcar one stop earlier and then why there were so many people and signs in front of “her school.” I asked her why she thought they were there.  She said, “It must be somebody’s birthday. It looks like a birthday party. But the signs look just black and white so they aren’t very colorful or pretty.”(We were too far away for her to see signs with rainbows)

We took a wide berth and walked 3 extra blocks and avoided the protest to protect her.  She doesn’t yet need to know that anyone thinks her parents don’t deserve to be married.  She only needs to know love and support and confidence in her family and friends.  At the Prop 8 Town Hall last week an adult woman stood up and talked, through tears, about how sad she felt when prop8 passed because her moms are married.

I was thinking about this protection when I was leaving the state building after dropping Lucy off at preschool.  She was happy on the couch with her friends, surrounded by teachers and kids who are all her friends and supporters.  Outside it was much different.  There were signs opposing gay marriage purporting that opposing our marriage also “protects” children.  And then there were all the children holding or standing with adults who were holding varieties of yes-on-8 signs.

Why do they bring their kids into this if they purport to protect children?  I like to give them the benefit of the doubt and hope they aren’t teaching their children to hate.  I hope.

Beauty = Dustin Lance Black on 22 February 2009:

If Harvey had not been taken from us 30 years ago, I think he’d want me to say to all of the gay and lesbian kids out there tonight who have been told that they are less than by their churches or by the government or by their families that you are beautiful, wonderful creatures of value and that no matter what anyone tells you, God does love you and that very soon, I promise you, you will have equal rights, federally, across this great nation of ours.

This really resonated with me (because I think I’m just about everything my family didn’t expect and it was my life’s Imperative, with, yes, a capital I, to leave their world) when I heard Nancy Updike say this at the end of “This American Life – God’s Close Up, Season 1″ by Ira Glass

Choosing not to become the person your family expected is painful. You have to leave their world completely just to make sense of your own life and then fate lures you back whenever it can to give you the chance to measure the distance between their world and yours and see if it’s still just as far as you remembered.