May 13, 2009
Barbara J. Nelson Speaks for Me: “I Am Like A Free Person of Color in a Slave State”
Before anybody goes ballistic, this has nothing to do with comparing the LGBT civil rights struggle to the AA civil rights struggle or anything like that — so anyone who thinks this is the perfect opening for another round of “Let’s Widen the Wedge” is wrong, and can go play that game somewhere else.
It’s the last paragraph that describes so well the uncomfortable position I’m in:
If the newspapers in Los Angeles, Sacramento and San Francisco are right, the Court may create, by analogy, a legal class like free people of color in a slave state, that is, gay and lesbian people who married under the full protection of the law in the window when same sex marriage was legal and who retain their marriage rights, while other gays and lesbians now are unable to marry and may not be able to do so in the future. John Hope Franklin, the great historian of the African American experience who died at 94 last month, wrote in his first book, The Free Negro in North Carolina, 1790?1860, “that free Negroes in a slave society must be carefully regulated lest their very presence serve to overturn the system.”
You know what else bothers me (besides the fact that I do not relish the prospect of being a person of privilege): I worry that if the court upholds Prop 8 and upholds my marriage, some gay and lesbian Californians may resent those of us who were able to marry within the window.
That wouldn’t be rational, and I don’t expect that reaction from the vast majority of my brothers and sisters, but I fear there will be a few whose anger will be channeled in the wrong direction — and that that misidrected anger will be exploited to the fullest extent by the Anti-Gays in a full-bore attempt to further divide the LGBT community.
I also know I’m jumping ahead; I don’t know yet what the court will do. But I know it’s best to consider every contingency imaginable, lest one be broadsided by the unexpected.
I guess if we marrieds end up like “free
Still, trying to anticipate the reaction (assuming we’ll still be legally married next month) is very unsettling.
Yet, curiously, I find some comfort in the Franklin quote — not the part about being “carefully regulated,” but the idea of our “very presence serv[ing] to overturn the system.” Perhaps belonging to this small class — and never letting even one other Californian forget our strange legal status or the circumstances of how it came to be — will be the impetus for correcting the 14th-Amendment-busting state of inequality the court will have created.
At the very least, our marriages will be a thorn in the state’s side… and the wound it leaves will remain raw as we continue to pick at it — until someone finds a way to properly treat the injury, instead of slapping a Band-Aid on it and hoping nobody notices the festering poison beneath.
Of course, the only way to do that is to overturn Proposition 8. I have no confidence whatsoever in the court to do that, and I am adamantly opposed to the idea of bringing the issue back to the ballot in 2010, 2012, or ever (in principle, that is; I will support all efforts to do so, because what other choice do I have?) — which leads me to believe California may have to wait for full equality until the day we have a Congress and a President willing to recognize our citizenship on a federal level.
Today, of course, we have neither that Congress nor that President.
Tomorrow? For my wife and me, our tomorrow has been wrested from our control, and depends on the wisdom — or the whim — of the court.
* …besides voluntarily divorcing in protest, that is. And to anyone who suggests such a thing, I say: “Are you nuts?” My marriage is not a political statement, and I’ll be damned if I get divorced to make a political statement.
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Filed Under: California, Civil Rights, Marriage, Proposition 8
