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Which
Way Forward for the GLBT Rights Movement?
by Donny Lessard /
April 2005 issue of Socialist Action
In 1947 the state of California made a historic move and struck down
that state’s ban on interracial marriages. At the time, 48 states had bans
on
interracial marriage. According to some polls from the time,
approximately nine out of 10 Americans said that they opposed interracial
marriage. It seemed that the battle for fundamental civil rights could
never be won.
But times and attitudes changed with a successful civil rights
movement that called for nothing short of equality. Their attitude is
summed up by the famous
quote from Martin Luther King Jr.: “Justice delayed is justice
denied.” They took their movement somewhere where it could not be ignored.
They took their fight directly to the streets.
Now we move forward to 2005, where the movement in question is the
one for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered rights. Before the
presidential election of 2004, several gay-rights groups and numerous gay-rights
activists jumped onto the Kerry campaign—and effectively ended the
militant, principled actions that had been occurring quite regularly since
spring of the year before.
If we recall, several cities—most notably, San Francisco—began
issuing gay-marriage certificates last spring in the face of state and
national legislative
opposition. Powerful rallies and demonstrations took place, which
brought high visibility and challenged legislators. These actions took
place independently of
the Democratic Party and called for nothing short of full civil
rights in the form of gay marriage.
Sadly, this all ended in the run-up to the 2004 election. Suddenly—despite the promising
beginnings of a gay-marriage movement—leading gay-rights
activists and columnists, such as Mark Engler, began telling us that
now is not the time, through rhetoric akin to the following: “In order to
win, Kerry needs
to pick his battles; gay marriage is not the one to pick.”
We were told to be patient and to accept and endorse Kerry’s plan
for civil unions, which was essentially the same position as Bush’s.
The truth of the matter is that the Democrats cannot be counted on
to advance the agenda of GLBT rights.
This assertion is supported by history. For example, Bill
Clinton—the beloved Democratic president of the 1990s —signed into legislation
the antigay Defense of Marriage Act of 1996, which effectively barred the notion
of gay marriage.
John Kerry was against gay marriage in this past election. His
supporters justified this by telling GLBT people to be patient, to work
from the inside, to
slowly chip away at it, etc. We have been slowly chipping away at
discrimination for 34 years, since the first gay couples tried to get
marriage licenses. They were not
only refused the licenses but fired from their jobs.
How long do we have to wait? How many election cycles will waste
time when we could have been forming a powerful, visible, GLBT coalition to
demand full
marriage rights?
The Kerry crew then told us that we should abandon the fight for
full marriage because it is “too radical” and work for civil unions. Civil
unions are not
marriage under a different name. They are a category of second-class
citizenship that denies fundamental rights and privileges that straight
married couples enjoy.
The General Accounting Office released a list of 1049 benefits and
protections available to straight married couples and denied to gay
couples. Civil unions would protect some of these, but definitely not all
of them. The struggle for gay
marriage should be for full marriage, with all the rights and benefits that
entails. The struggle of GLBT people is for nothing more than
elementary civil rights.
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