Open Government is Kind of Awesome

[ashnistrike]

The Obama transition team has put up a website with the best domain name ever, change.gov.  (Okay, hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com is pretty good, too.)  It is full of policy proposals and explanations.  It has pages that will tell you about all his staff picks as he adds them in.  It has a link to the Survival Guide for his staff picks, which is exactly like the survival guide that they give you when you take a new job or start grad school, except that it talks about senate confirmation hearings.  And every time you turn around, it asks for your input and ideas about how to get the country back on the right track.

It says nothing about LGBT civil rights, anywhere on the site.

Here are the input and ideas that I posted.  This can also serve as my belated Write to Marry post, which I entirely failed at last week because the Homosexual Agenda involved way too much grading and a grant proposal.
 

 

 

First let me say that I was proud to vote for you, and that I agree with 90% of your policy proposals.  I’m not writing about any of those things.  I’m writing to tell you about my family, in the hopes that you will be willing, as president, to help us—or at least not make our lives harder.

 

My wife and I met in college, bonding over a love of science fiction and a shared annoyance with our friends’ emotional soap operas.  She followed me when I went to graduate school, and worked hard to support me so that I didn’t have to take out student loans.  By that time, we knew that we would eventually get married, and we agreed that we’d have the ceremony the year after I graduated.  We also agreed that we’d marry as close as possible to our dating anniversary, so that we could celebrate them together.  During my last year of school, we narrowed that down to the one free weekend in June between our respective sisters’ study-abroad trips.

 

Because we’re both women, we knew that our marriage wouldn’t be legally recognized.  We told each other it didn’t matter.  We both believed firmly that marriage is about the promises two people make to each other, with the witness of god and their families.  A marriage is no less sacred, loving, or permanent even if the state denies it.  We still believe that.

 

I happened to get a postdoctoral fellowship at [my postdoc institution], and we moved to Massachusetts in the summer of 2003.  We immediately set about looking for a site and a photographer, finding a friend who would sew our dresses, all the usual wedding-planning items.  And we agreed that the lack of paperwork didn’t matter.  Still, we were delighted when, a few months into our preparations, the state court announced that same-sex marriage would become legal—exactly a week before our already-set date!

 

Mr. Obama, we were wrong.  The legal recognition did matter.  We saw the change immediately, even before the court’s ruling went into effect.  Wedding vendors stopped giving us flack or being confused when we talked to them.  My employers stopped acting like it was an imposition to give health insurance to my fiancee.  My in-laws-to-be, who’d been a little uncertain about the whole matter, relaxed and decided that a wedding was a wedding.  The main benefit that we got from legal recognition wasn’t visitation rights or tax breaks (though those are certainly important).  It was respect.

 

Since then, we’ve moved to Illinois, where I work as a psychology professor at [my tech school].  (I’ll bet you didn’t know [my tech school] had a psychology department.)  Even here, where our marriage isn’t legally recognized, the fact that our marriage is legal somewhere gets us more respect as a couple and makes our lives a little easier.  Still, it hurts, emotionally as well as financially, every time I have to lie about my marital status on a tax form, or get told by some bureaucrat that we don’t really count as a family.

 

My wife and I consider ourselves to be fairly traditional.  We work hard, try to avoid debt, and try to put away a little money at the end of the month.  (On an assistant professor’s and a secretary’s salary, we don’t always manage it.)  We own a house in a quiet neighborhood.  We plan on having kids soon, and my wife is going to stay home with them.  We believe that it’s important for children to have the full-time attention of one of their parents, and we know we’re fortunate to be in a position to do that.  We’re also lucky that we have a close-knit family of blood and chosen relatives, and that our kids will have a lot of good role models of all genders.  We have the resources we need to raise our children with the values that matter to us—responsibility, kindness, and the willingness to do their share of tikkun olum (that’s Hebrew for repairing the world). 

 

I also know that it’s going to hurt when my children ask me why some people believe our family isn’t as good as other families.  It’s going to hurt when they ask me if we’re “really” married.  You know, I think, how tough it is to have to explain prejudice to your children.  You know how tough it is to explain that it’s still worth working for a better world, even for the people who won’t do the same for you.

 

I’ve never been happy with the way most politicians, yourself included, will never go farther for us than to say that maybe “civil unions” are okay.  You ought to know that separate-but-equal is never really equal.  If you need evidence in this particular case, though, the state of New Jersey put together a commission looking at their Civil Union law, and found that the effects really weren’t equal to legally recognized marriage.  The report is on-line at <http://www.nj.gov/oag/dcr/downloads/1st-InterimReport-CURC.pdf>.  Again, they highlight the negative effects on children.  Gay and lesbian couples aren’t less likely to have kids if their marriages aren’t legally recognized.  But that lack does make their kids’ lives harder.

 

While it’s a bit more abstract, there’s also a freedom of religion issue at stake as well.  Most Christian churches, it’s true, refuse to marry people of the same gender.  But Unitarian churches are happy to marry them.  So are Neopagan clergy.  So are most Reform Jewish synagogues, as long as both people are Jewish.  When the law supports the marriage definitions of some religions, at the expense of others, that’s a violation of the first amendment.  I know that some Christian clergy believe that if same-sex marriage is legalized, they’ll be required to perform ceremonies for such couples.  Of course, this isn’t true.  Interfaith marriage has been legal for a long time, yet rabbis aren’t required to officiate it.  Any church is free to reject any couple according to its own principles, regardless of whether the state is willing to license that couple.  But the state should not play favorites among religions.

 

It’s a little weird, this week, being a Democrat in a same-sex marriage.  We’re thrilled at your election, of course, relieved and overwhelmed at the thought that our country is back on the right track.  I understand what Michelle meant when she said that for the first time, she was proud of her country.  I feel the same way.  I feel like you really are my president in a way that even Clinton wasn’t, let alone Reagan or Bush.  At the same time...  okay, if you’re gay, you carry around this map of America in your head.  There are bright spots, where the state acknowledges you as a real person, and your love as worth protecting.  There are dim spots, where state-level DOMAs mean you’re not likely to get that recognition any time soon.  And there are holes in the map, places that aren’t part of your America at all, because the law makes it impossible for you to get by.  (In Michigan, for example, my wife isn’t legally allowed to share my health insurance, while Florida forbids us from adopting each other’s children.)  And I can’t celebrate the election with a whole heart, because on Tuesday one bright spot went dim, and another hole appeared in Arkansas.  You’ve convinced me that I love my country—but my country only has 47 states.  If I count places that see me as an equal citizen, it only has three.  And even over those, I can’t ignore the fog of the federal-level DOMA.

 

During the campaign, you occasionally talked about repealing DOMA.  During your acceptance address, you called out to gay and straight Americans alike.  But your transition website, up the day after California took away our right to marry, and Arkansas took away our right to even have children, says nothing about these issues.  I know you have many urgent problems on your plate right now.  The world and the country are in crisis, and as someone once said, the problems of two people don’t amount to a hill of beans.  Nevertheless, we still exist, and our civil rights are still important.  To us, they’re vital.  I urge you to remember our families, and recognize us as truly equal.

 

 

I also added in a PS about breed-specific rescue programs.  I assume I'm only the twenty gazillionth person to do that today.

 

Comments

[liminalia.livejournal.com]

It's not quite accurate that it says nothing anywhere about LGBT civil rights.
http://change.gov/agenda/civilrights/
mentions plans to pass the Matthew Shepard Act.

However, I, like you, would like to see marriage rights mentioned on the site, and I think your letter was eloquent. I hope they're listening.

[liminalia.livejournal.com]

Here's what I wrote in the Contact Us page:

Enter "gay" in the search engine for this site. 0 results.

Joe Biden said during the debate that he and President Obama believed gay families should have the same constitutional rights as straight families. Mr. Obama mentioned "gay and straight" in his acceptance speech. Yet gay and lesbian Americans are completely absent from this website or this administration's developing agenda. Even the Matthew Shepard Act is not described in a way that mentions gays and lesbians.

On the same night that millions celebrated the Obama/Biden victory, thousands of families in California, Arkansas and Arizona were forcibly reminded that they were still second-class citizens. That's not right, it's not in keeping with our highest ideals, and it is not "embracing our better history".

I, and many thousands of other queer Americans, worked for Mr. Obama's campaign at least partially in hopes that he would do better for us than the Republicans have done. I am saddened to find us ignored so far on this website and this agenda. It is my sincere hope that you will correct this oversight swiftly, and that it is an oversight and not a deliberate erasure.

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I get the impression that a lot of people have posted criticism on this issue; hopefully the administration will listen.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

That's a great letter.

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

Thank you. It's so nice how it feels worthwhile to argue with these people. After watching the Bush administration remain oblivious while the streets of every major city filled with protesters, I could never see the point of sending them more than prepackaged complaints.

[saganth.livejournal.com]

I'm incredibly moved hon. That's probably the most eloquent thing you've ever written. I just hope someone in the new administration listens and acts for your sake. For all our sakes.

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I hope so, too.