Hello all. I had nine hours of sleep (in a row!) last night. In celebration, I thought I’d post something for the first time in Donkeys’. So, how about a roundup of recent news from the US gay marriage front? (Be sure to add anything I’ve missed in comments!)
- New Hampshire: The New Hampshire House on Monday soundly rejected a bill repealing the state’s new gay marriage law, voting by a two-to-one margin to kill it.
- New Mexico: An attempt to define marriage as between one man and one woman failed in the Senate Rules Committee Monday by a vote of 5-2.
- Illinios: Illinois’s likely GOP gubernatorial candidate, state Sen. Bill Brady (R-Bloomington) filed a proposed amendment on Feb. 10. It calls for amending the Illinois Constitution “to provide that a marriage can only be between one man and one woman.” If approved it would also ban recognition any “uniting of persons of the same sex in a civil union, domestic partnership, or other similar same sex relationship.”
- DC: The Archdiocese of Washington has decided to drop its foster care program in light of D.C.’s pending gay marriage law. “It was a very high-quality program, so this was really hard,” archdiocesan spokeswoman Susan Gibbs said of the foster care/adoption service. “We said last fall that we could not continue this program if the bill was passed as written. Well, this has come to pass.”
- Texas (Gods bless Texas. How fricking funny is this?!): The attorney general of Texas says a divorce granted recently to a pair of lesbians (married in Mass.) is invalid because state law does not recognize their same-sex marriage.
And finally, fabulous and tragically poignant all at once,
- New York State: Kitty Lambert and her partner, Cheryle Rudd, tried to apply for a marriage license in Buffalo, N.Y., on Wednesday. When their application was rejected, Lambert asked for a random man from the nearly 20 people gathered in the city clerk’s office. She and a male stranger less than half her age were issued the marriage license.
Feminist Philosophers 
Thanks so much for this, elp. The usual suspects are reliably showing up! Apparently the Church says that it is highly immoral to place children in a same-sex partners’ home. I am mystified by this; perhaps they think that sexual orientation floats through the air and gets inside the children?? After all, quite a bit is based on good old Aquinas, though he didn’t think an early fetus is a human being.
[…] See the article here: Gay Marriage Roundup: the good, the bad, the comically bad … […]
yes, i find it baffling that the church have chosen to teach the district a lesson, as it were, by denying aid to disadvantaged children. the told-you-so in the quote is especially distasteful. smacks of hostage-taking.
Nice to have you back! Sleep is good. (Actually, I shouldn’t have corrected my typo– originally wrote “sleep is god”.)
One positive thing about the Archdiocese’s decision: At least their homophobia is out of the closet now…
Imo, the example from New York State also shows the whole absurdity of our matrimania (obsession with marriage): As a society, we seem to value relationships that wave around a piece of paper more than any relationship that is build on love, trust, and respect.
rachel, good point about The Church.
btw, i thought i’d give everyone a list of facebook groups that they may want to join. i’m still too computer-useless to put links in my comments, so just search these names in facebook:
Repeal Tennessee’s Marriage Amendment
Repeal Texas’s Marriage Amendment
Repeal Oregon’s Marriage Amendment
Repeal Michigan Anti-Marriage Amendment
Make ME Gay [i love the name of that one!]
Repeal Ohio’s Marriage Amendment
Repeal Maryland’s Marriage Amendment
Repeal Michigan’s Ban on Gay Marriage
Repeal Kentucky’s Heterosexist/Homophobic Marriage Amendment!
Repeal Virginias Anti same sex marriage amendment.
Repeal Missouri’s Marriage Amendment.
Repeal Nebraska’s Marriage Amendment.
Repeal Florida’s Marriage Amendment.
Gay Marriage In Tennessee
Equality NC
Empire State Pride Agenda
We Will Repeal the Mississippi Marriage Amendment
Equality California
Tennessee Equality Project
…and i’m sure there are so many more. the press have started to pay attention to these facebook fan things, so i think it really does make a bit of difference adding to their numbers.
And if you want to move beyond marriage, you might want to join the Alternatives to Marriage Project.
Given all the problems feminists and others have documented with marriage, I always feel uneasy with these discussions. Clearly, excluding one segment of the population from marriage is discriminatory. But to me, the best solution is to remove the bright red dividing line between married and unmarried rather than simply moving it (hat tip to Nancy Polikoff for this great way of putting it!)
rachel, i actually agree with you. thanks for posting the link. but i think alternatives to marriage is sort of a separate issue: the issue at hand wrt gay marriage is, i think, one of equality. the value of marriage as a state-sponsored institution is neither here nor there, in a way. (and i think the equality concern is the more immediate one.)
-also btw, there’s a hetero couple in the uk in the process currently of suing for the right to have a civil partnership. (currently, cp is only available to ss couples.) i think this is a move in your (our) direction. it doesn’t seem to have much popular steam, tho–largely, i suspect, because the british public are perfectly happy to treat cps as marriages and dismiss the difference as simply one of semantics (and i suspect this is both because britons are rather blah about marriage in general, and because CofE types tend to be in the majority, jesus-wise, and are in general cool with the lbgt community).
You all might have already seen this, but this was Diane Savino’s excellent speech right before New York voted on a gay marriage bill (it didn’t pass unfortunately- but she’s still brilliant).
I’m sympathetic to a view against marriage totally- at least in the US the argument used over and over is that gay marriage is a threat to the sanctity of marriage. I’m tired of hearing it from politicians who are supposed to uphold separation of church and state. I think if they want to frame discourse about marriage in terms of sanctity, then it shouldn’t be legislated by the state, and everyone should have the option of civil unions. If it’s a civil instituion, rather than religious, then their primary argument against gay marriage just doesn’t work.
well put, kathryn. i think this video was posted on our blog a few months (weeks? i’ve lost track) ago. excellent speech, indeed!
btw, i’ve just come across this web site, which does a much better roundup than i’ve done, and it gives more general info on the issue and (very useful) gives a map showing what’s happening state-by-state:
http://www.freedomtomarry.org/