Below is a guest commentary I wrote and submitted to Bay Windows this week, regarding Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders’ (GLAD) challenge to the federal Defense of Marriage Act filed on Tuesday. I previously wrote on this subject at Q-Notes‘ blog, assembloge.
Guest Opinion
DOMA challenge comes at bad time
by Matt Comer, Bay Windows (Boston, Mass.), March 5-11, page 6
As a native and resident of North Carolina, a just turned-slightly-blue, politically precarious state, I read with trepidation the news of Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders’ (GLAD) federal challenge
to the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).
While part of me is ecstatic that our movement is going forward, the cautious (and, perhaps, scared) side of me holds back. What does GLAD’s challenge to DOMA mean for states like North Carolina?
I’m afraid our national LGBT community is repeating the same reckless mistakes over and over again. In the mid-1990s, Hawaii’s move toward civil unions prompted a national, anti-gay backlash resulting in a federal DOMA and similar statutes in the majority of U.S. states. In the early years after the turn of the century, similar strides forward created anti-gay havoc in another majority of states in 2004, 2006 and 2008.
The post-2000 backlash was the most painful — unlike statutes, constitutional amendments can’t as easily be undone.
States like mine and flyover states like Indiana without anti-gay state constitutional amendments on marriage are, as Tar Heel State blogger Pam Spaulding says, “sitting ducks” in the continued state and local onslaught against LGBT equality.
What might be a positive step forward for liberal states like Massachusetts and Connecticut could turn out to be a huge leap backward for states like mine.
North Carolina remains the only Southern state without an anti-gay state constitutional amendment. A challenge to the federal DOMA gives our already more-than-well-organized, anti-gay opponents all the ammunition they need to ride roughshod over our LGBT citizens and write discrimination into our constitution. It doesn’t matter that GLAD is only challenging part of DOMA; the religious right here will make use of the filing and add it to their arsenal of anti-gay propaganda and hate.
As Massachusetts moves forward, what will organizations like GLAD, and national groups like the Human Rights Campaign and National Gay & Lesbian Task Force, do to help the few remaining states where LGBT community members have sweated blood and tears to hold back the tide of anti-gay amendments?
Will we be left to fight alone? Will we be forgotten? Will we have to wait to be saved by the U.S.Supreme Court some two, three or four decades from now?
As our movement pushes forward, I implore our national leaders and those with GLAD to keep in mind the impact their actions will have on LGBT Americans living in less liberal states, towns and communities.
Matt Comer, 23, lives and works in Charlotte, N.C. He is the editor ofQ-Notes, the LGBT newspaper of the Carolinas.
March 5th, 2009 at 9:23 pm
Nicely put….
March 6th, 2009 at 10:35 am
Put most bluntly, yes, you may need to wait until you are rescued by the US Supreme Court. It’s an uncomfortable process of forward, then backward; progress here, then regression there, but it is the only way change happens. As gay couples in Massachusetts continue to marry and benefit from marriage, their straight friends and neighbors now know exactly what marriage looks like. When they move from Massachusetts to North Carolina, they will be able to explicitly articulate the differences and injustices. If every state waited until the other states were “ready”, I’m not sure equality would ever come.
Evan Wolfson talks about a “critical mass” which must be reached, at which point the US Supreme Court (or Congress) will be compelled to intervene and mandate federal equality. We don’t know what that mass is, but until then, states like Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, and even Maryland must continue pressing forward and encouraging others to walk boldly with them.
In all of that, I truly hope North Carolina is not forgotten. If you need me, let me know and I’ll come down and take a stand with you!
March 9th, 2009 at 11:53 am
Very well said, Matt.
I tend to agree, though, that GLAD should still push on. I also agree that GLAD and others in the political fight for equality should meet and talk about a national, organised effort on what path we should all take. As shown in California, not everybody who wants equality can agree on the right azimuth to take.
March 10th, 2009 at 7:51 am
[...] it is no secret that I’m a bit displeased with the timing of this DOMA challange in Mass., the suit itself raises some important constitutional issues. Slate chooses to call it [...]
March 10th, 2009 at 10:05 am
I appreciate this post. Like you, I’m from North Carolina, though I currently live in Boston. I enjoy the privileges of being legally married here, but my heart is never far from North Carolina. I understand my story as being inextricably linked to the stories of friends in NC who can’t get legally married, or who can be fired from a job tomorrow simply for being gay.
And this is why I would rather devote some of the ample financial and organizational resources that are housed in Massachusetts not to advancing my privileges as a resident of this state, but to furthering the protections available to our brothers and sisters in states like North Carolina, Missouri, and California. Our movement will not succeed without sacrifice and this sacrifice will take different forms for each of us. For some it means being out in hostile environments. For some it means coming out for the first time. And for others it means understanding that, in a national movement, being at the front of the pack is about pace-setting not about winning, is about helping those at the rear stay in the race, not about leaving them in the dust.
http://jbf.typepad.com/jasmine_beachferrara/2009/03/challenging-doma-its-bold-but-is-it-the-right-thing-to-do.html
January 1st, 2010 at 4:46 pm
[...] challenge of the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). I thought the move came at a bad time, and wrote a guest commentary which was published in the [...]