by Dwight Cathcart

by Dwight Cathcart

Wednesday, June 18, 2014

Hillary Clinton coming to terms with her past

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Hillary and Bill Clinton, headed into the 2016 election, have to deal with what they did in the nineties. Many people have this problem. Senator McCain regularly acts as if he didn’t do what we know he did. 

Hillary was asked this past week about her views on marriage equality—she was famously against it during the election in 2008—and whether it could be said that she changed or the American public changed. In her interview with Terri Gross, Hillary says, “I did not grow up even imagining gay marriage and I don't think you probably did either. This was an incredibly new and important idea that people on the front lines of the gay rights movement began to talk about and slowly but surely convinced others of the rightness of that position.” 

The trouble with this—none of us even thought about it until a few people led the way—is that it leaves out the moral consequences of a person’s failure. Everybody has seen pictures of the couples who are finally allowed to get married, couples who have been together twenty or thirty years, and have been legally prevented from federal marriage rights in the eighteen years since DOMA was passed and signed by Bill Clinton. Children have grown up to adulthood without ever having married parents. Gay families—parents and children—have been denied all financial benefits that the federal government makes them entitled to.  After DOMA was enacted, states had the right to enact what Justice Bader Ginsberg called “marriage lite” but the presence of DOMA made it extremely unlikely that any state would pass legislation that opened up marriage to full equality. DOMA was very seriously injurious to every single GLBTQ person. It was a stigma which GLBTQ people carried. Even if you want to get married, you can’t.

Hillary Clinton was implicated in all this, and consequently she has an obligation to acknowledge it. If a person doesn’t do the right thing, it is incumbent upon that person to acknowledge that her failure has serious consequences no matter how good her excuses. Doing the right thing now is insufficient if she doesn’t also acknowledge her past. 

The public  consensus on marriage equality is changing fast, and many people are caught in the situation Hillary is caught in. As a kindness to everybody else in her predicament, Hillary ought to show us all how to do it. She should say this: “I was wrong in the nineties about marriage equality and about Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and about DOMA. That hurt many people seriously. My thinking has evolved since then, led largely by the leaders of the GLBTQ movement.” 

I can vote for Hillary Clinton. But I do want her to get her thinking straight about this. The lives of many Americans have been seriously damaged because of what she and her husband did in the nineties, and that ought to be acknowledged. We ought to hear her say, “Yes, I did that. That hurt people. That was wrong.”


Having said that, she would then be completely free to say, “I can now say, I am completely committed to marriage equality.” And I would be free to vote for her. 
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Monday, June 9, 2014

Getting straight what happened

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I think we ought to get our language straight. The Wisconsin federal district judge Barbara Crabb ruled on Friday that Wisconsin’s same sex marriage ban is unconstitutional. A good, short, description of the principal legal aspects of the event are on Slate, here. 

Several articles focussed on the human consequences of the judge’s decision. One woman is quoted saying this:  “We are finally going to be recognized—after 25 years together—as a couple with legitimacy.” Her quotation can be found in the video here. This seems to be a fairly typical take on these federal cases. After twenty-five years together, they are finally going to be recognized as a legitimate couple. 

Minimally, these couples are getting access to the federal marriage benefit. Additionally, they are getting access to those fabled eleven hundred other benefits everyone talks about. These are tangible benefits of marrying. Yet so often, the couples getting married rejoice because of a less tangible result of the decision. Now they are going to be “respected” in the community. As here, they are going to be “recognized as a legitimate couple.”

I feel compelled to say that my husband and I were already recognized as a legitimate couple in our community, a community composed of our closest friends, our closest relatives, our children, our grandchildren, the people we each worked with. None of this has changed. On the day that we married each other, everybody on the beach with us knew that we had been together a very long time, even if they all didn’t know how many years it had been. They knew we had come through very hard times together—both in his life and in mine—and also very good times, and that we were going to make it. We were recognized as a legitimate couple.

The people who did not recognize us as a legitimate couple before that beautiful day on the beach were the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the United States of America. And what happened on Race Point Beach, the major thing that happened on Race Point Beach, was that the governments of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and of the United States of America demonstrated that they had come around and were going to respect us too.

To whom the rest of us, C and I, and all our kin and all our friends from Boston and Somerville and from the West Coast and the Midwest and the South, who gathered with us on Race Point Beach under an absolutely cloudless sky, could say, “Welcome!”
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Sunday, June 1, 2014

A marriage based on love, experience, mutual respect

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Jay Michaelson, writing on The Daily Beast, wonders what’s going to happen after we get marriage equality. Will the future be what gives conservatives nightmares—impermanent and non-monogamous marriage? Or will married people in the future be pretty much what marriage is today—most people are relatively monogamous? We don’t know, and what will actually happen is something out of our control. What we ought to think of is what do we think ought to happen?

I think a certain percentage of gay people have already adopted monogamy. We are all familiar with the relationships of friends who have broken up because one partner had sex with someone else. We don’t know whether that response to infidelity will spread to all married gay relationships. On the other hand, a study of gay men in San Francisco reports that 50% of married men say they are not monogamous.  Michaelson thinks this percentage is more likely 75% and wonders if straight men and women in monogamous marriages will start to give up monogamy, faced with the example of many gay couples. 

I suspect that the human race has never biologically tended toward monogamy. As Michaelson says, men have asserted the right to sex outside of marriage—all those concubines and slave women in the Bible and prostitutes at all times—for the greater part of history. Marriage has been about children and property, but not about committed, monogamous, romantic love between a man and a woman, and certainly not between two men or two women. Michaelson says that committed, romantic love between two persons did not become the basis for marriage until the last one or two hundred years. Personally I think that in the future we’re going to drift toward reestablishing the biological imperative.

If one man actually declares at the beginning of a marriage, “I will never ask where you have been,” and subsequently declares, “I will never charge you with betrayal,” then, all of the emotional energy around betrayal-of-the-marriage-vows would simply have its point taken away. 

A certain percentage of men is going to have sex outside a relationship. That’s what men do. And God knows we’ve seen that proven in the last fifty years, if you take almost any demographic you care to examine. But if the marriage is a good one—if they love each other—a temporary or even semi-permanent relationship outside of it needn’t be damaging. A smaller percentage of marriages will break up over these incidents. But if couples have declared at the beginning that these incidents are not grounds for cries of “betrayal” or eviction of the other party and calling a divorce lawyer, then the marriage goes on, children’s lives are not disrupted, the life the two people have created together—their home, all the ways they are financially intertwined, their contribution to the community, all the ways they have become enmeshed in each other—go on. This way of looking at the relationship puts the emphasis on devotion between the two men and takes the emphasis off of sexual things. In this kind of relationship, neither man claims sexual ownership of the other, and sex is not the paramount way they communicate. At the same time, they are sexually free to act any way they desire, including having a sexual relationship.

This describes marriages of men I know, some of whom have been married a very long time. One couple we know has been married more than 40 years. This kind of marriage has been developed during our years in the wilderness, with respect for the way men actually behave, and with respect for the whole relationship the two men have created. This is a sophisticated creation, and I suspect that many gay men are going to try to retain its features as we are assimilated into marriage. 
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