To love whom they please and to marry whom they love

As a kid, as a teenager, and later even as an adult in India, I hadn't known a single gay person.  For that matter, I hadn't known a single black, or a Mexican, or an Arab, or a white ...  But, I had at least seen black and Mexican and white characters in movies, and read about them in fiction.  I had no idea about gays.  Well, the only thing I knew about gays was when in college there was a "wink-wink" about a guy.

Sex and sexuality was not talked about in the old country.  An old Tamil saying captures well the essence: "மன்மதக்கலை சொல்லி தெரிவதில்லை" (the art of the (god of) love is not taught and learnt.)  What I knew, messed up and incorrect that was--as I would find out much later in life--I knew from friends and fellow-classmates, who were also equally ill-informed.

And then I came to America.

I distinctly recall being shocked, intrigued, a month or so into my life in the new country, when I saw two young women locking lips in the public, outside the apartment building, just like how a young man and woman typically displayed their affections in public.

Since that first exposure, it has been one heck of a rapid education about love, homosexuality, and the politics of it all.

It is not only I who have moved, and moved rapidly, from not knowing anything to getting to know gays and becoming very good friends with them:

In the 1950s gay sex was illegal nearly everywhere. In Britain, on the orders of a home secretary who vowed to “eradicate” it, undercover police were sent out to loiter in bars, entrap gay men and put them in jail. In China in the 1980s homosexuals were rounded up and sent to labour camps without trial. All around the world gay people lived furtively and in fear. Laws banning “sodomy” remained in some American states until 2003.
Today gay sex is legal in at least 113 countries. 

A remarkable transformation in our collective attitudes.

What could help spread tolerance? If the past half-century is any guide, the prime movers will be gay people themselves. The more visible they are, the more normal they will seem. These days 75% of Americans say they have gay friends or colleagues, up from only 24% in 1985. But it is hard to be the first to come out in a country where that means prison or worse.
...
For those who cling to the notion of progress, it is hard to believe that tolerance will not spread. After all, gay people are not demanding special treatment, just the same freedoms that everyone else takes for granted: to love whom they please and to marry whom they love.

How are things in the old country?

In India the past decade has brought considerable change. The first national magazine for gay people, Pink Pages, was launched in 2009. Gay-pride marches, if not necessarily very large ones, are a common sight in big cities. Bollywood has produced sympathetic films.
Yet even if it is becoming slightly easier among India’s elite to be openly gay, almost no one in public life dares declare it. And the legal position for homosexuals is in flux. In July 2009 a high court ruled that the ban on “carnal intercourse against the order of nature” in the penal code violated India’s constitution, a ruling which in effect decriminalised gay sex. In December 2013 two Supreme Court judges overturned the ruling. They said that parliament could pass a law to legalise gay sex; at the moment, that looks unlikely.

 With a party that actively talks up Hindu nationalism, odds are far from favorable for India's parliament to pass laws legalizing homosexuality.  But then politics works in strange ways.

While I can claim ignorance of youth for the errors that I made in plenty, I have always felt awful about the "wink wink" comments about that college guy.  I have no idea whether he was/is gay; but, in any case, I suppose I can come clean with a public apology via this post.

Getting the state out of the marriage business

When my parents got married--way back, and in India--there was no concept of marriage license, or registering the relationship with the state.  It was a family and a community affair.  The publicly celebrated event, conducted literally in the middle of the street, as was the practice in villages and small towns across India, made sure that everybody in the community knew who was getting married and to whom.  That was it.  It did not involve the state.

The state really has no business whatsoever in being an authority to bless a marriage.  How did the state ever end up in such a powerful position?  I suppose it is all because of taxes.  For whatever reason, when it comes to income taxes, married people are treated differently from unmarried ones.  Children also become "tax write-offs" so to speak.  Which means that the tax collector has to certify these relationships and, presto, the state becomes the marriage license broker.  From taxes, it slowly spread to all other benefits that married people get from the state or employers.

But, the role of the state is to merely ensure that contracts are implemented and not violated. 

Grandfather is wrong. Are we stuck with the incorrect call?

The following is a letter from the Oregonian:

What my grandfather, John M. Vranizan, fails to see in his June 30 letter on "Gay marriage"is that my generation sees same-sex marriage as the civil rights issue of our time.

His argument that a civil union has the same benefits, without the title, is a modern version of the Jim Crow laws, being separate but equal. Since he grew up in that era, it is hard for me to understand how he can not see the link.

As to his views on the evolution of mankind: Evolution does not stop; we continue to grow and change in new ways. That is how our ancestors evolved from our great ape cousins, to develop a society more tolerant of people's beliefs and ways of living.

If I was sterile, with no potential to have children, I know my grandfather would want me to adopt, as he knows that being a good father is a life-long goal of mine. I do not comprehend how he could not allow gay couples to do so, too.

This issue does not change the way I love my Grandfather, or the way he loves me.

PATRICK M. SCHNEIDER
Southwest Portland
Schneider is 24. His grandfather is 75.  

 As the same paper's editorial put it a few days ago, "It's time to emancipate our state from the onerous Measure 36."

But, of course, undoing it won't be easy, though not impossible--requires amending the state's constitution.  Oregon is one of the 29 states in a similar situation:

legislators are bound not by today's constituents but by yesterday's voters. Many of those voters aren't even around anymore. The strongest support for banning gay marriage, nationally and in nearly every state that has faced a referendum, has come from old people. In Arizona, California, Oregon, and Wisconsin, voters below the age of 30 opposed ballot measures to ban gay marriage but were outvoted by their elders. In Michigan, Ohio, and Virginia, young voters split almost evenly. Today, you can see the same pattern in Ohio, Oregon, South Dakota, and other state and national polls. Gay marriage is becoming a majority position in part because people are changing their minds, and in part because a generation that's OK with homosexuality is replacing a generation that wasn't.
The question now is whether the new majority will get its way. To undo the constitutional amendments of the past decade, supporters of gay marriage will have to pass ballot measures in those states. In Nevada, they'll have to do it twice. Passing ballot measures is hard. People tend to vote against them out of suspicion and fear, particularly when you're messing with the constitution.

Meanwhile, our increasingly wimpy president, who with every passing day is testing the political winds, instead of going after good and correct policies, displays his verbal skills when he says that his views on gay marriage have been "evolving."  Yeah, right!  Looks like his ideas have been regressing ever since he announced his candidacy for the presidency! 

"Evolve already!"

How to ruin gay marriages

I think this deserves an Emmy right away :)

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But, ... Colbert has competition from Jon Stewart ... I love the ending with Reagan :)

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Obama opposes same-sex marriage. Awful.

Yet another instance when I wonder why Faux Noose always refers to President Obama as a liberal, when he consistently and loudly distances from what would truly be liberal.

Here we have conservative justices appointed by Republican presidents ruling in favor of gay marriage, and a Democratic President opposes gay marriage?  How twisted is this scenario?  I understand that it is all politics at a presidential level.  But, come on ...

Senior adviser David Axelrod said the president supports "equality" for gay and lesbian couples, but did not address directly Obama's position on Wednesday's court ruling, which struck down as unconstitutional California's Proposition 8, a 2008 ballot initiative banning same-sex marriage in the state.
"The president does oppose same-sex marriage, but he supports equality for gay and lesbian couples, and benefits and other issues, and that has been effectuated in federal agencies under his control," Axelrod said on MSNBC.

The last Democratic President before Obama, Bill Clinton that is, signed into law the Defense of Marriage Act, according to which the federal government recognizes marriage as only between a man and a woman.

Personally, as I have blogged earlier, I believe that a government has no authority to "recognize" marriages.  The government's job is to merely ensure that the contractual agreement that two adults enter into is faithfully carried out.  The government is not in the job of making the contract a holy sacrament--for those who need that recognition, well, we have all kinds of religious institutions that provide that.  In my world, whether it is heterosexuals or homosexuals, we all get the same "civil union" contractual registration filed with the government.  End of story.

Update (Aug 6th) David Harsanyi writes:

In the 1500s, a pestering theologian instituted something called the Marriage Ordinance in Geneva, which made "state registration and church consecration" a dual requirement of matrimony.
We have yet to get over this mistake. But isn't it about time we freed marriage from the state?
Imagine if government had no interest in the definition of marriage. Individuals could commit to each other, head to the local priest or rabbi or shaman—or no one at all—and enter into contractual agreements, call their blissful union whatever they felt it should be called, and go about the business of their lives.

And, to quote, again, Martha Nussbaum (ht):

Should the state be in the business of dignifying certain unions? The answer would be no. If we were starting over again, we'd want to go back and look at the privileges associated with marriage--tax benefits, immigration status, etc.-- and ask, Who do we want to give those benefits to? What do we want to do? That kind of thorough rethinking would be ideal, but it's also not likely to actually happen. How do we get from where we are to there? In the short run, I think the best thing is just to push on the equality issue and say, So long as marriage is offered by the state, it should be offered with an even hand.

I have said this before, and I bet I will say it many time over in the future:  the law is a ass--a idiot :)

Another anti-gay Republican .... is gay

I lived in Bakersfield (CA) for almost a decade.  A highly socially and politically conservative place that was. Here is an example: the local college invited to campus a well known poet, Frank Bidart, for, well, poetry reading and Q/A.  There was a great deal of protest because ...he was gay!  And the icing on this crazy cake?  He was a local guy--was born and brought up in town before he moved to the East Coast, and he still had family in town.  Yet the protests ....

One of the local politicians was Roy Ashburn, who systematically contested and won election after election.  At one time there was even speculation that he might head to the Congress.  The guy was typical of the local pols who were highly successful--ultra conservative Republican talk.  (Not "Conservative" but Republican.)  Ashburn was also, as one can then imagine, anti-gay.

So, there I was checking with the newspaper from Bakersfield and I almost fell off the chair when I read a series of reports on Ashburn and his homosexuality:

“I am gay. Those are the words that have been difficult for me for so long,” a sometimes emotional Ashburn told local talk radio show host Inga Barks 

So, why was he vehemently anti-gay, and why did he support anti-gay policies?

Ashburn has taken heat in the last week for having been both closeted and a consistent voter against gay-rights related legislation. In the interview, Ashburn repeatedly argued he voted the will of his constituents in his conservative 18th Senate District, which includes much of Bakersfield.

“I took a position based on what I believed was the will of my constituents, not mine, necessarily,” Ashburn said. “We have a representative form of government ... where citizens select people to cast votes on their behalf.”

Bah!  It was strictly a game he played in order to win re-elections?  How awful! The Fresno Bee editorial has the best line on this:

For Ashburn, being part of the club of elected officials apparently was more important than voting his conscience. That's disturbing. It's also extremely hypocritical, no matter how Ashburn tries to spin it.

But times are changing. Most younger voters don't care about sexual orientation. Ashburn could have shown leadership by trying to change the minds of others. He never gave his constituents the chance.

I wish Ashburn well .... but, I also hope he will understand how much his anti-gay politics caused pain and hardship to gays. I look forward to reading his apology in a future issue of the Bakersfield Californian.

High court bans same-sex friendships

Jason Jones explains the sanctity of marriage :)

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The conservative case for gay marriage

Ten years more in Iraq? CA upholds gay marriage ban?

A couple of years ago, the comedian Chris Rock had a great joke that the world was all upside down because the best golfer was a white, the best rapper was a black, and the best basketball player was Chinese.
We can add to that: Iowa okays gay marriage, and California upholds the gay marriage ban. It was not even a close vote: 6-1!!!
Welcome to the bizarro world!

And, if all that was not enough, the army chief says US is ready to be in Iraq for ten years.

WTF!