MyOutSpirit.com Gay Spirituality Blog

1,000+ Reasons for Marriage Equality

“What are we really protecting? We have a wedding channel. We are giving away husbands on a game show.” – Senator Savino

There is a list of more than 1,049 benefits and protections available to heterosexual married couples. These range from federal benefits, such as survivor benefits through Social Security, sick leave to care for an ailing partner, and tax breaks. They also include things like family discounts, obtaining family insurance through your employer, visiting your spouse in the hospital and making medical decisions if your partner is unable to. Civil Unions protect some of these rights, but not all of them.  If you receive a marriage license, it is recognized in any state. If you want to have a Civil Union, then it will only be honored in the state that provided it and does not hold the same protections.

The United States Constitution guarantees equality for all. Marriage and civil unions are not the same. Creating equal access to marriage is the only fair way to ensure equality for gay and straight couples alike.

According to Lambda Legal Defense, more than 1,400 legal rights are conferred upon heterosexual married couples in the United States. On the website, http://lesbianlife.about.com/od/wedding/f/MarriageBenefit.htm, they list twenty-five:

1.    Joint parental rights of children

2.    Joint adoption

3.    Status as "next-of-kin" for hospital visits and medical decisions

4.    Right to make a decision about the disposal of loved ones remains

5.    Immigration and residency for partners from other countries

6.    Crime victims recovery benefits

7.    Domestic violence protection orders

8.    Judicial protections and immunity

9.    Automatic inheritance in the absence of a will

10.  Public safety officers death benefits

11.  Spousal veterans benefits

12.  Social Security

13.  Medicare

14.  Joint filing of tax returns

15.  Wrongful death benefits for surviving partner and children

16.  Bereavement or sick leave to care for partner or children

17.  Child support

18.  Joint Insurance Plans

19.  Tax credits including: Child tax credit, Hope and lifetime learning credits

20.  Deferred Compensation for pension and IRAs

21.  Estate and gift tax benefits

22.  Welfare and public assistance

23.  Joint housing for elderly

24.  Credit protection

25.  Medical care for survivors and dependents of certain veterans

Just last week, my home state of New York, denied Marriage Equality by a vote of 38-24. It seems strange that after 15 years of being in a loving relationship with my partner, I am denied the rights of someone who could apply for a marriage license without hesitation as long as they are heterosexual. Senator Savino said it best in her testimony, “We have nothing to fear from love and commitment."

Many of us have been made to feel less than at one point in our life because of the color of our skin, because we are women, because of our age. We all have a voice. Now is the time to speak up for Marriage Equality. I am committed to my life partner through sickness and health, for richer and poorer, until death do us part. How committed are you to equality?

If you were denied your right to collect your spouse’s social security benefits, would you sit and do nothing? If you had to pay taxes on your spouse’s health insurance benefits, would you sit and do nothing? If your spouse lay gravely ill in the hospital and the hospital denied you rights to make medical decisions, would you sit and do nothing? If you and your spouse adopted a child, but you were denied joint adoption rights, would you sit and do nothing?

Would you say it was just not the right time for these basic rights to be given to you? Tell me what date, day, and time will be the right time and I will be there. In the meantime, now is my time.

Mary Anne

For a clear picture of Marriage Equality, please listen to New York State Senator Savino testimony.

 

Mary Anne Flanagan is an intuitive Shamanic Practitioner and Teacher, Life Coach, workshop facilitator, inspired speaker, and creator of Toning the OM™. Her passion is in assisting people to live life with conscious habits and patterns which support them on their path to abundance and fulfillment. She has a private healing & coaching practice in New York City. Mary Anne Flanagan/Toning the OM™: toningtheom@yahoo.com or 917.238.9726. Visit www.toningtheom.com to register for shamanic circles and workshops.

When is Incest Not Incest?

[The following commentary continues our ongoing conversation on "Reconsidering Marriage."  Read Clayton's first two editorials "Reconsidering Marriage" and "Rick Warren Comes Out for Gay Rights," and additional commentary by our bloggers Azariah Southworth ("Show Rick Some Love") and Joe Perez ("What, was Jeremiah Wright busy?").]

The LGBT community is mistaken about the fight for marriage equality.  Many of us equate the battle for equal partnership rights with the war for equal respect and recognition of our relationships, and the two goals are not the same.

If Rev. Rick Warren - arguably the most influential Protestant minister in the world - is willing to come out in public and say we should have equal partnership rights, we have won a significant battle.  The fact that he does not afford our relationships with equal respect and recognition in his church is not what we are trying to change here, but that is the real reason why we have attacked him since: "He compared our love to incest and pedophilia! He won't let gays join his church!"

We all have different paradigms through which we interpret the world; that is why Gandhi said, "There are as many religions as there are people."  So what is Warren's paradigm that explains how he can say at the same time that he supports gay equal partnership rights and also declare that to him gay marriage is the same as "having a brother and sister together and call that marriage" or "one guy having multiple wives and calling that marriage?" 

If we look at the world through Warren's eyes, here's what I think we see:

Slightly more than 50 percent of households are headed by unmarried people, some single and some partnered, and almost a third of children in the United States are being raised in unmarried homes. About 40 percent of unmarried partner households, queer and heterosexual, have children under 18 years of age living in them. Many aging baby-boomers will spend a significant part of their senior years alone. Many will live with relatives or friends in non-conjugal relationships. Increasingly, both married and unmarried adults are serving as primary caregivers for aging and infirm parents or other relatives. Many people live in extended-family households. Needless to say, LGBT people in each of these categories often face the added burdens of homophobia and transphobia.

Requiring marriage as a way to access legal recognition and the economic support of a caring society is not a viable option for millions of households. Consider, for example, these kinds of families: senior citizens living together or serving as one another's caregivers, partners, or constructed families; close friends or siblings who live together in long-term, committed, non-conjugal relationships, serving as each other's primary support; extended families living under one roof (a practice common in many immigrant communities). [1]

Same-sex couples and these other diverse, non-traditional partnerships would benefit greatly from the rights and responsibilities currently only associated with heterosexual, conjugal marriage, but, while Rick Warren recognizes that these families would benefit from equal partnership rights, he rejects that those partnerships be called "Marriage."

This means that in Warren's paradigm, "having a brother and sister together and calling that marriage" doesn't necessarily mean incest. This is why he declared that he has never equated same-sex couples with incest or pedophilia - it wasn't what he meant.

The LGBT community should see beyond our own narrow issues and build a broad coalition, including Warren, to call for a broader definition of family so that marriage, for all who choose it, is only one option among many, not the only way people can access essential government protections and supports like unmarried partner access to health insurance, second-parent adoption, and survivor benefits for Social Security and pensions.

We should take this rare opportunity to fight for legislation to provide access to a flexible set of household benefits and options that are separated from the requirement of conjugal or marital relationship.

What form does victory take?  On December 30, Ali Shams and Kaelan Housewright, two straight California students, introduced a ballot measure to eliminate marriage from State legislation, guaranteeing everyone equal Domestic Partnership rights and voiding Prop 8.  If we can relinquish the word "marriage" to non-governmental (i.e. sacred) recognition, we have the chance to help millions of households by pursuing civil unions for all.  LGBT people will no longer be seen primarily as a self-interested constituency, but as partners in a larger, multiracial struggle for social and economic justice for all.

I believe we will eventually win the war for equal respect and recognition of our relationships, but let's go ahead and win the fight for equal partnership rights in the meantime.

Love,
Clayton

[1] This article includes quotes and statistics from KAY WHITLOCK's "The Perfect Storm: Why Progressives Must Reframe the Narrow Terms of Marriage Politics," PEACEWORK MAGAZINE, April 2007.

The universal value of marriage

Hugo Schwyzer, the Episcopalian pro-feminist blogger, married dad, and gender studies professor (hope I got all that right), adds his 2 cents to the Carnival of Feminists with a post defending the institution of marriage. His argument is one that I would characterize as quintessentially "integral," though Hugo only describes himself as having a "passion for reconciling contradictions."

His thoughts on marriage hint at complex, post-liberal and post-conservative solutions, pro-feminist and pro-male and pro-human activism, and respectful of a wide variety of dissenting perspectives. Plus, I just think it's totally right.

But you can read Hugo and judge for yourself. Here's a quote:

I am a cheerleader for marriage because I see the tremendous possibilities the institution still has to serve, as I’ve said again and again, as a vehicle for mutual personal growth. Actually, to be fair, my attachment is less to marriage itself and more to the idea of enduring monogamous commitment. Whether that commitment is formalized or not is less important than whether it is made in the first place, and whether the two people making that commitment are willing to challenge each other and sacrifice together.

But as passionate as I am about marriage, I dislike the conservative embrace of the institution as a solution for serious social problems. The conservative formula, made clear by everyone from Maggie Gallagher to Wade Horn to Warren Farrell to Mona Charen, is this: with the decline in marriage, the obligation of the state to care for its most vulnerable citizens has increased...

Read the whole post: "Another post on marriage, social policy, choice and necessity."

The Right and Sex

by Dwight Welch

One of the things that strikes me about conservative arguments on homosexuality is that they tend to focus almost exclusively on the biological aspects of sex.

Here's another piece bashing the idea of gays having children. It all revolves around biology: sex is about producing babies, gays can't do that through "natural" means, so this must be immoral. The idea of basing the morality of an act on this premise is odd.

Because there's nothing moral involved with biology. If there were, animals that produce an infinite number of offspring would be the most moral of creatures. The whole point of the Christian tradition is that there is something in us which is not simply animal, biological.

Rather we're created in the image of God, blessed (and sometimes cursed) with the possibilities of self transcendence, such that sexuality if it takes on any moral character will be more than simple biology. It ought to be a reflection of certain ideals and values that are choice worthy.

Biological Parents Living Together? What about all the concubines?

 

By John G.

There are some topics that I don’t like to post on – mainly ones that involve the private lives of individuals. Mary Cheney has always proved a difficult figure for me as a blogger, because I want to respect the privacy of her personal life, but at the same time, her father’s Vice President-ship gives her a certain level of prominence that attracts a lot of media attention. Whether it’s the much discussed Dear Mary campaign during the last election, or the current brouhaha over her pregnancy, she is a figure that liberals and progressives can’t help pointing out as a stain in the Republican party’s claims to moral superiority. And while conservative voices have seemed to mostly bite their tongues in the past, they’re not pulling any punches now.

What I really want to think about in this post isn’t Mary or her pregnancy, but the reaction from many conservatives and Evangelicals to her and her pregnancy. Specifically, I am trying to think through Biblical examples of parenthood and family life, to determine what the Bible says about how to raise children. I think its an important exercise, because while I would not advocate Biblical parenting techniques unless psychology upheld them, Biblical dialogue seems to be missing from the religious Right’s critiques of families that eschew the “biological father and biological mother who are living together” model. Why is that? Maybe because Biblical examples of parenthood show that God doesn’t mind parenting models that the religious Right bends over backwards to condemn. Moral of the story: it would appear that one can embrace so-called alternative parenting and family models and still be a good Christian.

Because it has been well discussed by others and because I’m not attempting to advance any theory of parenting techniques, I’m not going to take the time to dive into actual scientific work on parenting. Rather I’d like to point out why the Right is holding up pseudo-science and not the Bible in their discussion of family structure. Additionally, I’d like to show how those of us who are convinced by peer-reviewed, credited scientific research can use the Bible to support parenting by not only same-sex partners, but many other living arrangements as well. (I will throw out there, for reference, one of the better discreditings of the religious Right’s pseudo-science, which was on Slate: Lesbians of Mass Destruction: The Empty Case Against Mary Cheney.)

When GetReligion attacks

By Joe Perez

Can you'all stand two posts in one week that point out the bizarre carping of Mollie, contributor to GetReligion? For those of you who don't know, GetReligion is the blog on "religion and the media" by conservative religionists. Their schtick is usually to show how virtually all stories in the "mainstream media" have an anti-religious bias of one sort or another.

Mollie Ziegler's thing seems to be to find stories that raise topics related to gay people and our lives and then she oh-so-politely attacks the journalists who wrote them for not interjecting enough venom and hate towards gay people. Oh yes, she says "objectivity" where I say "venom and hate." It's a tiny area of disagreement that I call a cross-altitude misunderstanding.

Gay marriage is wrong, says alt-weekly editor

Rod Dreher says he agrees with Julie Lyons, the editor of the alt-weekly Dallas Observer. Hey, two great minds agree: gay marriage is bad, very bad. What's surprising is that Lyons' job as the head honcho of a progressive newspaper obviously hasn't won her enlightenment. You can read a clip from her anti-gay editorial here.

My own two cents' worth: Lyons' argument suffers from a bone chilling self-contradiction. The root reason for her opposition to gay marriage? Why, it's because gay marriage epitomizes the "stinking self-absorption of this age." So what does she do? She looks to her OWN, SELF-DEFINED heterosexuality ("It's all about Me, Me, Me!") and posts that as normative for all.

Defiant church won't marry straight couples

At a time when the shameless pope has renewed his attack on gay relationships and famiies -- at Eastertime, no less! -- it's a tonic to understand that other church leaders show great courage in supporting GLBT people.  From Planet Out:

A Minneapolis church has voted to stop performing civil marriages for heterosexuals because civil marriage isn't offered to same-gender couples.

"I will officiate at only religious marriages for same- and opposite-gender couples alike," said the Rev. Don Portwood of the Lyndale United Church of Christ. "I will no longer sign marriage licenses as an agent of the state of Minnesota, until the state of Minnesota recognizes the loving commitment of all couples."

Read the whole story here.  Hat tip to my pastor, Bradley Schmeling.

Polygamy and same-sex relationships

I have to say, polygamy doesn't bother me much.  I know people who like polyamorous relationships, and my internal response is usually, "sounds appealing in some ways, but also like way too much work."  Dyads are tough enough.  I don't see why polygamists should be felons, but I don't particularly think they have a claim on the legal sanction of their relationship, either.

Thoughts on Love Won Out

Today's vigil (or protest, depending upon what you'd like to call it) was surprisingly well organized and, thankfully, positive in tone.

At this point, I don't have a final count of attendees.  The plan was to have a presence in the morning during registration and the afternoon, when the conference concluded.  I would estimate around 400 people (though the local news put the figure at "dozens", since they covered the evening presence).  The picture doesn't show it, but the building is very large, and the line of people wrapped around the perimeter.  As promised, some thoughts.