Proposition 8 shut the door, for now, on same-sex marriages in California. Subsequent litigation by its supporters threatens to untie some 18,000 legal marriage bonds that took place between mid-June and election day. Californians are not the only victims.
This is part two of my series on how the failure to defeat Prop. 8 has affected the gay couples in my Texas university town. In this installment, I follow the relationship of two young men through their initial meeting as undergraduates, engagement, commitment ceremony--and finally, ten years after they met, their marriage on the steps of San Francisco's city hall.
Then the narrative goes back in time, to their birth in the 1970s, and charts the progress of gay and lesbian rights at the university they would choose to attend: ultraconservative Texas A&M in College Station. For ten years, TAMU officials fought a protracted legal legal battle against certifying an official gay and lesbian student group. The issue was decided by in favor of the gay students by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1984, but only after the Texas Attorney General declined to fund A&M's final appeal--so definitively had the Fifth Circuit Court in New Orleans spoken in favor of the students.
By contrast, LGBT Aggies today enjoy an active student group and an array of university-funded support activities. A network of 600 Aggie Allies--gay and gay-friendly professors, staff, and graduate students attend training, and then make themselves available to counsel and mentor students who seek their help. A GLBT Professional Network helps queer Aggies at all stages of their careers, a speakers bureau dispels prejudice, and the university even offers counseling services to the parents of students who come out.
As no good story exists without it villains, this essay then take on Aggie homophobes past and present, from a VP of Student Services who was intent on crushing the burgeoning GLBT movement on campus to a couple of large donors to Yes on 8, one a distinguished professor of business and the other a nondescript lab assistant--who gave thousands to make it impossible for their gay students to marry legally.
From Recognition Litigation of the 70s to Gay Marriage Battles of Today; Proposition 8's Long and Intrusive Reach to Texas A&M, Part 2 can be found on my blog, The Aggie Insurgency, at:
(While I won't promote every post, this is the start of a project and it's detailed over at the local blog where it originated for those interested. - promoted by Karl-Thomas Musselman)
Like most progressive Texans, I found myself caught up in Barack Obama's historic run to the presidency. I followed the struggle over California's Proposition 8 only fleetingly, as the polls indicated that the effort to make same-sex marriage unconstitutional there was going down to defeat.
Nov. 4 was bittersweet. Gay couples are some of my closest friends. At least two from my Aggieland UCC church had taken advantage of the five-month window of opportunity to be married in California, and now they fear their nuptial rights would be nullified.
Postmortem consensus identified the need to make converts, one person at a time, as gay rights in California had fallen -- albeit by a small margin -- to the plague of ignorance. But before that could take place, one other admonition seemed preeminent: Sun Tsu's advice to "keep your friends close, but your enemies closer." There's a hazard in building up an army if you don't know the insurgents in your midst.
Using the San Francisco Chronicle's convenient search engine, I entered "Bryan" and "College Station." The results for anti-Prop. 8 contributors were predictable: a few scattered donors who gave modest amounts.
But I was in for a shock when I selected the option to see who in Aggieland had donated in favor of taking marriage rights away from my LGBT friends. Two Texas A&M academics gave thousands of dollars, hardly a response I had expected from the intellectual community.
Here's my response, detailed on my own personal political blog, in a post entitled: Aggies Do Not Lie, Cheat nor Steal, but Breaking Up Other Aggies' Marriages is Apparently an Honorable Endeavor: Prop. 8's Long and Intrusive Reach to Texas A&M
I hope this will inspire other progressive Texans to do their own amateur investigative reporting in their own community. Root out the agents of intolerance near you, expose them, and then we can start working -- one neighbor at a time -- to lighten the darkness.
Just like Steve Jobs made iPods for fun. Well Apples had something to do with both, I guess.
Some of you understand this really is breaking news, but in theological time that is measured by millenia, so the tag would have been unrealistic.
Apparently in a sermon entitled "Gay is Not OK" delivered last Sunday Pastor Robert Jeffress of First Baptist Church of Dallas made the following points:
1. God made sex for fun;
2. Steve Jobs is like God because he made iPods
3. The FBC Pastor plugged his new iPod into the wrong outlet so it fried.
4. Whoever plugs his sexual equipment into the wrong outlet will fry just like the iPod
--An employment posting on the Web site of the religious-right group Let Freedom Ring, sponsor of the Pennsylvania Pastor's Network (which is modeled after the Texas Restoration Project and Ohio Restoration Project), calling attention to the fact that the PPN "was hiring 10 full-time organizers to help churches get out the vote, suggesting a sizable and well-financed effort," according to The New York Times.
Lots of great news about the religious right today.
First, there's Rick Santorum and the Pennsylvania Pastors Network going all out to get congregations to violate IRS regulations against partisan politicking by churches. As noted above, the PPN seems to have a nifty little litmus test for their political organizers.
Then there's the great story about Ralph Reed being called out in a Senate report for receiving more than $5.3 million in payments from Jack Abramoff for his great work on shafting Indian casinos.
Finally, since the religious right can't get Congress to pass a ban on gay marriage, they're going to the states in an attempt to convene a Constitutional Convention.
1138 Why that number? There are 1,138 federal rights, protections and responsibilities automatically granted to married heterosexual couples. These are the same rights, protection and responsibilities that are being denied to Gay & Lesbian couples in many states. The Religious Right and the Repugnant Party are also trying to deny these rights with the Federal Marriage Amendment.
