In 2013, heterosexual US Senator Rob Portman (R-Ohio) came out as a supporter of same sex marriage, a shocking about face from any notable member of a political party who as recently as 2004 included "Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve" in their party platform. What caused him to drop his ball gag and Bible and pick up the shield of GLBT equality? His son came out to him. This caused two things: an ever-widening acknowledgement that conservatives are not capable of empathy beyond their immediate social network and the shocking fact there is still a "debate" over same sex marriage.
Later that year the Supreme Court Guardian Council ruled that a portion of the Defense of Marriage Act was unconstitutional and the federal government could not deny marriage benefits to couples that had been been legally wed in a heretical state such as Hawaii or Iowa. This set off a wave of celebrations across the county, only muted by the fact that in roughly thirty-eight states you still couldn't marry your partner in a shameful, homonormative version of "traditional" weddings. Things have accelerated over the course of the last two years and now over 64% of the US population will soon live in a state where anyone - and I mean anyone - can marry. This shift in public opinion, legislation and court rulings is amazing and worth further exploration, so get into my time machine and let's revisit an earlier time in this wonderful county's rich history.
In 2003-2004, this was a different America and I don't know mean that as a code for Tea Party "I don't recognize my country anymore" bullshit. The culture war, like the Iraq war, was raging and permanent victory for conservatives was seemingly within their Darth Vader-like grasp. When I asked a grocery store co-worker why she was voting for Bush, she asked me if I was a Christian and upon hearing I wasn't smugly told me "then you wouldn't understand." Howard Dean wore the same bulletproof vest while campaigning that he had the day he signed the Vermont civil unions law. The Massachusetts Supreme Court forcibly legalized same sex marriage causing notable Bostonians Matt Damon and Ben Afflect to marry each other and begin work on a Good Will Hunting reboot starring Jaden Smith and Sean Hayes, currently stuck in developmental hell with the tenth Hellraiser movie.
It was a humiliating time to be a liberal, watching your country ascend into reactionary order. Was this like being one of those atheist Brights during our previous Great Awakenings? During the 2004 campaign, US Senate hopeful Jim DeMint said homosexuals and pregnant women should be forbidden to teach in public schools. Florida's Mel Martinez called his GOP primary opponent a "darling of homosexual extremists." Louisiana's David Vitter took his Congressional oath of office while wearing a diaper. Eleven states took the rare and trite occasion of a democratic election and voted to enshrine bigotry against gay people in their constitution. Timothy McVeigh was posthumously pardoned by the United Nations.
Things got a little better as George Bush respectfully and delightfully faded out of the presidency and Barack Obama illegally assumed office, but even he couldn't bring himself to say the words about same sex marriage that we needed to hear (though, as seen in the video below, he has had first-hand LGBT experiences).
Further, on the day Obama won California's 322 electoral votes, a majority of people also approved Proposition 8. This resolution ripped rights away from same sex couples and made closeted anti-gay activists sad, happy and in general confused. One of the few pieces of good news we got during Obama's first term was when New York State passed full marriage equality, but it didn't feel as good to celebrate since Governor and confirmed piece of shit Andrew Cuomo was the one to sign it. And there isn't a sizable gay population in New York outside of a few couples in Greenwich Village.
Looking back, this all seems like a long-ago nightmare. These days same sex marriage has majority support in polls of libertarian online communities. Jim DeMint is no longer in the Senate. States with smaller proportions of evangelicals have passed same sex marriage at the ballot box. Conservative activist Jared Loughner sits in prison and we've had openly gay sports stars in our least gay sports: basketball and football (the former being an especially sweet, remembering Larry Johnson's trailblazing transgender turn as "Grandmama"). How did we come so far?
Certainly part of this is those of us who have come out of the closet. The percentage of people who in polls say they personally know a gay person has increased astronomically in the last twenty years - much more than support for LGBT political issues. For conservatives like Rob Portman, closeted homosexuals like Lindsey Graham, open homosexuals Republicans like Ken Mehlman and obvious heterosexuals like Charlie Crist, this personal experience with an oppressed group makes the oppression seem uncouth. Most elected politicians are rich and cannot identify with the plight of the working class (though obviously progressive ones are still a million times better on the substantive issues). But being gay doesn't affect one race, class, ethnicity or religion more than another. So even these sheltered, myopic politicians are eventually put in touch with a non-heterosexual person who might at one point ask them, either directly or with a look in their eyes: why am I less than you?
Though my lizard brain didn't need to meet gay people to side with their plight, it sure didn't hurt. Since graduating high school (in the bottom 5% of my class) and leaving my 6000 "person" town I've lived all over this great country and met people who dutifully fill every stripe of the LGBTQ+ rainbow. For most of us, meeting and knowing these folks isn't a novelty anymore - it's just part of life in this rich cultural tapestry of America. Even our bigoted fathers, responsible for some vile (but mainstream) words about homosexuality, now know to keep their mouths shut on this issue, besides a few half-hearted utterances about reverse discrimination, religious freedom and other right wing buzz terms so pathetic that I refuse to use the quotation marks they desperately need to surround them.
Now here we sit here in 2014 at the twilight of our civilization. Federal appellate courts continuously bequeath rights that should have been enshrined in the Articles of Confederation, while we wait for respectable, brilliant conservative jurists like Antonin Scalia on our Special Clerical Court to end this charade once and force completely equality. We're almost at the point where we can treat people as normal no matter where they put their rotten genitals, but until conservative family organizations stop busing in Black and Hispanic Christians to protest outside courthouses, and until they stop yelling horrific things that make gay millennials cry, we'll keep fighting for complete and unmerciful LGBT supremacy.
Now I finally have the courage to come out of the closet.
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