Today, #LoveWins Along With the 14th Amendment

Today, #LoveWins Along With the 14th Amendment
June 26th, 2015: Gay marriage ended — suddenly, in a 5-4 Supreme Court ruling, it became just marriage.

I remember arguing so publicly 11 years ago on CNN and every other news network. Let’s revisit those arguments.

And now, it’s law, and nothing that man from Concerned Women was worried about is happening, will happen, has happened. Just the opposite. For most people in America, nothing really changed as each state legalized, and the patchwork of marriage began.

And now, that fight is over for good.

I remember its real beginnings. AIDS. I was there during the 1980s when a president wouldn’t mention the word, and a world turned its back on the sick. I remember ambulances not taking patients, doctors not touching people, nurses turning away and ultimately, funeral homes refusing bodies. In the 20th century, no less.

And I remember families shutting out loved ones. Couples that had been together 20 years — one would get sick and the other was locked out of the hospital room, and ultimately locked out of their own house by family who had claims. You see, no marriage, no claims to property, to visitation — nothing. Suddenly, when one got sick, the other lost their life and often their belongings. And it was legal.

The only way to rectify that was marriage, period, end of story. And the fight began.

Now, in the age of barebacking and PrEP therapies, younger gay men don’t remember the root of the struggle, how it came to a head, finally, in the 1980s with the advent of that terrible disease that still had no cure and no really effective, safe, long-term treatment.

We owe this day, those on the side of marriage equality, to the Republicans in more ways than one. First, there is the beautifully drafted 14th Amendment to the Constitution; one written at time of reconstruction, after slavery. It states:

Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

In other words, equal equals equal, and since marriage is contract law, you can’t discriminate based on gender, sexual orientation, race, or any other reason. Period.

Five of the justices got that. The other four, not so much, but like dinosaurs, they are falling in the tar pit of the wrong side of history, screaming and flailing about as they go. But going they are.

In one week the court has said yes, you can keep your health care America. Then the people said that a 150 year old flag was, in fact, bigotry and hatred. And now, the court again has said that gay people can marry in all 50 states. Not a bad week for Americans.

Reaction all day has been tears, hugs from strangers, congratulatory remarks. Finally.

I will save the nay-saying about gays in other countries and the atrocities that still exists. I will spare the fact that ENDA, which guarantees I can’t be fired for being gay, still isn’t the law of all 50 states.

Because today it wasn’t #LoveWins. Today #WeAllWon because that fabulous document and that great amendment did its job.

Justice Kennedy, bless you. May joy find you and may your family be blessed. Because today, you created so many families in one fell stroke.

To all of you out there that have fought, straight, gay, whatever, I love you. Thank you. Today you didn’t slap us down or make us feel second class. Today, we are Americans, one and all.

To hear this or other interviews get the FREE Karel Cast App, subscribe in Spreaker to the Podcast or simply go to the most incredible website on all the planet, save this one, karel.media

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From David Beckham To Russell Tovey, Celebs Can’t Contain Their Excitement For Marriage Equality

From David Beckham To Russell Tovey, Celebs Can’t Contain Their Excitement For Marriage Equality

With today’s historic ruling that every American is equal and we can get married in all fifty states, many of our favorite celebrities were as quick to celebrate as we were. Gay entertainers such as Ricky Martin, Sir Ian McKellen and Sean Hayes, as well as our icons like Madonna and Jennifer Hudson and supportive athletes like David Beckham congratulated each of us for the long struggle that led to today’s victory.

Scroll down to see some of our favorite notes, photos and videos.

David Beckham let his rainbow flag fly.

A photo posted by David Beckham (@davidbeckham) on Jun 26, 2015 at 12:00pm PDT

Jennifer Hudson’s heart has always been in the right place. 

Frankie J. Alvarez got particularly animated about today’s victory.

Tyson Beckford didn’t post a nearly nude pic for once, but we’re OK with it…this time.

Nev Schulman got caught expressing himself.

Finally some good news!

A photo posted by Nev Schulman (@nevschulman) on Jun 26, 2015 at 9:46am PDT

Madonna is living for love today.

Finally And at Last! The Revolution Of Love has Begun! ??????????#livingforlove ??#rebelheartsunite A photo posted by Madonna (@madonna) on Jun 26, 2015 at 9:23am PDT

Ricky Martin spelled it out.

#JusticeFORALL thank you #scotus

A photo posted by Ricky (@ricky_martin) on Jun 26, 2015 at 9:21am PDT

Donnie Wahlberg became one with Jordan Knight.

#LoveWins #LoveAlwaysWins A photo posted by DONNIE WAHLBERG (@donniewahlberg) on Jun 26, 2015 at 8:44am PDT

Russell Tovey is extra magnetic today.

#ugorondinone truth! X #artstar #lovewins #lovesavestheday

A photo posted by Russelltovey (@russelltovey) on Jun 26, 2015 at 8:22am PDT

Andy Cohen thought back to the Stonewall Uprising.

A photo posted by Andy Cohen (@bravoandy) on Jun 26, 2015 at 7:38am PDT

Joe Jonas showed his true stripes.

???????? GO AMERICA! A photo posted by J O E J O N A S (@joejonas) on Jun 26, 2015 at 7:38am PDT

Darren Criss knows where to find a good party.

Vicious stars and NY Pride grand marshals Sir Ian McKellen and Derek Jacobi blasted some Queen.

And perhaps our favorite is Sean Hayes and hubby Scott Icenogle, who indulged us with an old-school musical salute.

What’s better than a supreme taco from Taco Bell? The Supreme Court of the United States. Thank you for making marriage legal for EVERYONE today. Best birthday gift ever. Here’s a celebration video from my legal husband and me. #MarriageEqualityForAll #LoveWins #SCOTUS

Posted by Sean Hayes on Friday, 26 June 2015

Jeremy Kinser

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Vivian Gornick’s ‘The Odd Woman and the City: A Memoir’: Book Review

Vivian Gornick’s ‘The Odd Woman and the City: A Memoir’: Book Review

There’s an astonishing moment about halfway through Vivian Gornick’s moving, trenchant new book about life in New York. Rushing onto the subway at 14th Street, late for an appointment, she notices a man with a seven- or eight-year-old boy sitting across from her. The boy is deaf—he and the man sign to each other—and “grotesquely deformed,” with “the face of a gargoyle.” But as the stations pass and the man and the boy become absorbed in their conversation, “fingers flying, both nodding and laughing…I find myself thinking, These two are humanizing each other at a very high level.” Soon she finds her perception has changed: “the boy looks beautiful to me, and the man beatific.”

The Odd Woman and The CityIt isn’t really the boy or the man who are changed, of course, but the writer who watches them, and the humanizing potential of urban life is the theme that binds together this “collage” of vignettes, images, overheard conversation, musings, and excursions into literature and history. For years Gornick has walked the streets of Manhattan almost every day, and she finds her “sore and angry heart” eased by what she finds there, “the fifty different ways people struggle to remain human,” “the urgency of life.” At night, looking at the buildings surrounding her, she feels herself “embraced by the anonymous ingathering of city dwellers.”

Such moments offer a respite from a persistent sense of discontent Gornick anatomizes in these pages. She takes her title from George Gissing’s 1893 novel ‘The Odd Women’, in whose portrayal of feminists Gornick recognizes herself. Throughout her career Gornick has pursued what she calls a “politics of damage,” impelled by “an impassioned sense of having been born into preordained social equity.”

But Gornick realizes that her discontent has become something she cherishes. “It was then that I understood the fairy tale about the princess and the pea,” she writes. “She wasn’t after the prince, she was after the pea. That moment when she feels the pea beneath the twenty mattresses, that is her moment of definition.” For Gornick, too, grievance is an important, maybe an inalienable, part of her identity.

For Gornick’s mother, “to find love was not simply to have sexual happiness, it was to achieve a place in the universe.” There’s plenty of “sexual happiness” in these pages, but Gornick’s romantic relationships are always short and often fraught with tension. From adolescence Gornick has had the intuition that the romantic connection she sometimes longs for is at odds with the “revolution” she envisions. At times, she says, “I consciously felt men to be members of a species separate from myself. Separate and foreign.”

Not romantic love, then, but friendship is at the center of Gornick’s life. One of the most affecting threads of the book concerns her friendship with Leonard, a gay man she meets with every week over the course of many years, her most enduring relationship. “The fact is, ours is the most satisfying conversation either of us has,” Gornick writes; “our subject is the unlived life.” Leonard appears irregularly through these pages, often vying with Gornick for the most disaffected commentary. “I’m not the right person for this life,” Gornick sighs at one point. “Who is?” Leonard replies.

Vivian GornickGornick’s love for Leonard is evident and undeniable. “The self-image each of us projects to the other is the one we carry around in our heads,” she writes, “the one that makes us feel coherent.” But even here she keeps a distance. But, while she was tempted in the beginning of their friendship to make grand pronouncements—“You are me, I am you, it is our obligation to save each other”—she soon recognizes that their friendship doesn’t displace her essential sense of solitude. “What we are, in fact,” she realizes, “is a pair of solitary travelers slogging through the country of our lives, meeting up from time to time at the outer limit to give each other border reports.”

For Gornick, no one could be as constant or sustaining a companion as the city itself, and her memoir is at its most beautiful when it rhapsodizes about New York City. Gornick frequently turns to poets as she meditates on urban life—Frank O’Hara, Hart Crane, Samuel Johnson, Charles Reznikoff—but one of this book’s greatest virtues is the pleasure she takes in the voices she encounters on the street. She hears poetry in everyday speech, which isn’t just a medium for communication but a constant source of surprise, delight, beauty. This is why “most people are in New York,” she writes: “because they need evidence—in large quantities—of human expressiveness.”

‘The Odd Woman and the City’ is a rich and compelling store of such evidence. It’s destined to be an enduring volume in the literature of urban life—and required reading for anyone who loves New York.

Previous reviews…
David Crabb’s ‘Bad Kid: A Memoir’
Mark Merlis’ ‘JD’
Helen Humphreys’ ‘The Evening Chorus’
Kim Fu’s ‘For Today I Am A Boy’

Connect with Garth Greenwell on Facebook and Twitter.

The post Vivian Gornick’s ‘The Odd Woman and the City: A Memoir’: Book Review appeared first on Towleroad.


Garth Greenwell

Vivian Gornick’s ‘The Odd Woman and the City: A Memoir’: Book Review

Replicating Our Victories

Replicating Our Victories
It’s the question everyone working on nearly every progressive cause wants to ask, and hopes can be answered: “How do we win on our issue as quickly, and as convincingly, as the LGBT movement has?”

At some point over the past few years, I’ve been asked that same question, in one form or another, from advocates working on gun control, the death penalty, climate change and immigration reform, to name just a few. The rapid progress our country has made for LGBT people — from repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” to today’s landmark Supreme Court ruling on marriage equality — has captured the attention of our allies in other movements who want to know how they can replicate that success.

Part of the equation, of course, is putting together talented people to lead the way. Brilliant minds — like Mary Bonauto, the architect of the legal fight for marriage equality — planned and persevered when even many in our own community doubted the prospects for success. Visionary thinkers — like Dixon Osburn and Michelle Beneke, who skillfully explained the domino effect that open service would have on other rights – understood that hard data and compelling stories could move even the military to charge. And even entertainers — like Ellen DeGeneres, who knocked down television’s closet door even when it sent some advertisers running – played a critical role in moving public opinion on equality.

Yet, even with such forward-thinking leaders working on the cause, the fight for equality often required serious collective soul-searching among advocates who faced formidable roadblocks and setbacks along the way. And ultimately, those are the moments that can teach us the most about how to win.

Take 2008, for example. As the country and the LGBT community were celebrating the election of our country’s first African-American president, voters in California, Florida and Arizona blocked marriage equality in their states. At the time, they joined 27 other states that had already done so.

Those losses at the ballot box, especially during the 2004 election, when 11 states passed marriage bans, led many to look to the courts for victory. Even as they did, however, opponents of marriage equality began peddling the idea that “activist judges” were poised to overturn the will of the people and “impose” their views on the country.

What happened then was remarkable.

As couples began filing suit to have their relationships recognized, their stories made headlines in the national news. These new faces of the movement – couples who had spent decades together, raising families, building businesses and serving their country and their communities — ushered in a sea change in public opinion. As their suits were filed, and their stories were told, more and more of the public understood that these families were just like all families.

The courts, in eloquent and often passionate rulings, cited these same experiences of same-sex couples who were simply asking the court to recognize that their families were entitled to the same protections as other families.

Using the power of stories, the courts went from over-ruling public opinion to helping shape it.

(Just today, Justice Kennedy noted in his majority opinion bringing marriage to all 50 states that, “As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves.” He went on to write that, “Their stories reveal that they seek not to denigrate marriage but rather to live their lives, or honor their spouses’ memory, joined by its bond.”)

Marriage equality, everyone quickly understood, wasn’t what the right-wing had been so effectively selling for years. In truth, it was about Edie Windsor, her partner of four decades and their wish to build and bequeath an estate just like their straight neighbors. It was also about Bradford Wells and Anthony Makk, who desperately needed the federal government to recognize their marriage so that Anthony, who was caring for Bradford as he battled HIV, would not be deported. And it was about the men and women in uniform who were fighting for freedoms abroad that they were being denied at home.

Their experiences, and the victories they helped make possible, tell us two things: First, that telling our stories, and standing up to do so even when the consequences may be dire, has immense power. And secondly, that the courts must remain open to, and working for, everyone because they have a pivotal role to play not only in protecting our constitutional rights, but also in shaping how we see our country and its pledge of liberty and justice for all.

Today, a majority of Americans support marriage equality. That’s in large part because LGBT people came out, spoke up and asked for change. But it’s also in part because the courts did their job, too.
Moving forward, these lessons can continue to lead us to greater equality still.

Even as the Supreme Court has recognized this historic tipping point in our nation’s history, other issues are still at their starting point. The marriage equality blueprint – of stories told hand-in-hand with smart legal strategies – can help there as well.

At Public Justice, we’ve seen that when brave students, for example, speak out against bullying, their stories can move courts and schools to make sweeping changes that help ensure others aren’t harassed and abused. That’s why we launched our Anti-Bullying Campaign in 2013. We’ve worked with students who have been bullied, harassed and assaulted based on their actual or perceived sexual orientation, gender, race, ethnicity, and religion to create change in local school districts that can be a road map for national progress. It doesn’t matter why a student is targeted; the solutions for addressing and preventing bullying are the same.

And as states struggling against the tide of change answer the Supreme Court’s ruling with new laws designed to implement new forms of discrimination against LGBT people, an effective response will be critical to battling those attempts in the courts and in communities.

That, in essence, is how we can replicate the marriage equality victory and win other fights for LGBT equality and other issues, too. Telling our stories – to our neighbors, our co-workers, the media and the courts – has the power to change history and change many, many minds, too.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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We’re Worried, People: Did Rick Scarborough Stick To His Guns And Set Himself On Fire?

We’re Worried, People: Did Rick Scarborough Stick To His Guns And Set Himself On Fire?

http://queerty-prodweb.s3.amazonaws.com/wp/docs/2015/06/Screen-Shot-2015-06-19-at-3.20.18-PM.jpgNot to scatter rain clouds on  everyone’s parade, but while slugging down flutes of pink champagne and hurdling fistfuls of confetti in the air, a troubling thought occurred to us: Have any of you heard from Rick Scarborough? As we reported Monday, the pastor promised — we’re imagining on a stack of bibles — to set himself on fire should American homosexuals win the right to marry.

Well.

It’s been several hours since the announcement was made, and yet we haven’t heard a peep (or sky-piercing death rattle) out of him. (Even Wikipedia is on Christian Deathwatch today.)  If any of you live near Texas, could you pop ‘round the pastor’s pad and let us know if you find his charred husk chillaxin’ on the front stoop?

Related: Rick Scarborough Breaks New Ground in “Christian” Guilt

Please exercise caution: the 65-year-old opined that “the preachers need to get out front, the leaders need to get out front, out front of these ordinary citizens and say, ‘Shoot me first.’” You may find yourself trapped in a hail of gunfire, so dress accordingly. Vigilance is key.

If he does happen to set his pants on fire today, it could be another landmark event: The first time a Christian fundamentalist practiced what they preached.

Derek de Koff

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Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore’s Anti-gay Group Defiant In Face of SCOTUS Marriage Equality Ruling

Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore’s Anti-gay Group Defiant In Face of SCOTUS Marriage Equality Ruling

moore

The Foundation for Moral Law, the Montgomery-based foundation started by Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore’s, is pledging to defy the Supreme Court’s ruling legalizing marriage equality, saying that “the battle for traditional marriage will continue.”

WSFA reports:

The High Court’s ruling was illegitimate, according to the Foundation, which believes “at least 2 members of the Court’s majority opinion were under a legal duty to recuse and refrain from voting.” The Foundation has previously stated that Justices Kagan and Ginsburg should step aside because they have personally performed same-sex marriages. […]

The organization’s leaders say they believe churches, businesses, and individuals “are likely to come under attack for following their moral and religious convictions about same-sex marriage.” Executive Director Matthew Kidd went on, “When they are attacked, the Foundation will be there to defend them.”

The foundation is currently run by Moore’s wife Kayla.

The post Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore’s Anti-gay Group Defiant In Face of SCOTUS Marriage Equality Ruling appeared first on Towleroad.


Kyler Geoffroy

Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore’s Anti-gay Group Defiant In Face of SCOTUS Marriage Equality Ruling