An Attack on ‘Marriage Equality’? Or an Attack on ‘All Gay Marriage, All the Time’ Insanity? [UPDATED]

Apparently the John can’t tell the difference….

Or doesn’t want anyone to see the difference.

But, why should that surprise anyone?

A thinly veiled attack on marriage equality

…

I always worry when someone starts a talk by explaining how much they “really really care about marriage equality” but…

The Center for American Progress held a panel discussion yesterday titled “Why Black Gay and Transgender Americans Need More than Marriage Equality.” My ears immediately perked on hearing the title, since it sounded as if it were echoing the argument making the rounds of late that the battle for marriage equality is somehow anti-trans because it doesn’t help the trans community, even though it does – those trans people who are straight can already get married, those trans people who are gay cannot. The larger point being made is that it’s wrong for our community to push for marriage.

Gay marriage doesn’t help the trans community…

become equal to gays and lesbians in jurisdictions where gays and lesbians immorally erected for themselves a statutory legal status that gives them both the right to legal redress against discrimination and the unfettered right to commit discrimination against trans people.

But, as usual, if it doesn’t fit The John’s narrative, it doesn’t exist.

Gay marriage didn’t save a ten year old boy who killed himself after being bullied.  Was it supposed to?

…

The next speaker talked about how marriage equality should not be “the” goal of the community (who said it was?)

I’d like The John to volunteer to submit to a lie detector test to answer the following question: Have you really never heard any gay man or lesbian utter the phrase ‘Once we have marriage, nothing else will matter’ or some phrase substantively similar?  Because I damn sure have – and I live in Nothingsville, Flyoverstate, not in the Grand Duchy of Selfimportancy on the Potomac.

Of course, some marriage derangement syndrome sufferers actually do manage to avoid literally saying those words.

Neither Newt Gingrich nor Rick Santorum said that blacks are genetically lazy and morally shiftless and that they – along with the entire country – would be better off if the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments were repealed.

They didn’t have to.

As the SNL take on Fox ‘News’ goes: We don’t call President Obama a Muslim.  We imply it!

I always worry when someone starts a talk by explaining how much they “really really care about marriage equality” but…

I always worry when some over-privileged, out-of-touch, Beltway-addled gay white man starts a blog post by explaining how much he really, really cares about trans equality, but he isn’t going to consider it if the political effort needed to achieve it will cause him to have to wait fifteen minutes or so for something that he wants in addition to the rights he already has that trans people don’t by virtue of earlier generations of gay greed.

What I object to, and it was underlying concern the second I heard the title of this panel, is the notion of trying to establish different classes among us, in terms of who has suffered more, who’s more deserving, and who’s less deserving. And, as he noted, it is possible to multi-task and work on a number of issues at the same time.

Awwwwww…

Is The John actually upset that someone is trying to establish different classes?  Or is The John pissed off that at least some of the people who have been shunted off into the lower levels of classes long-since carved by Gay, Inc. into what had been the living rock of a civil rights movement are willing to point out that such class stratification was created by Gay, Inc., is being perpetuated by Gay, Inc., and that people in Gay, Inc. profit from it?

The John doesn’t have to say he feels that non-white, non-male, non-cis, nonfinancially-secure elements of the LGBT community are just envious.

He doesn’t have to.

Come to think of it, I’ve never seen John Aravosis and Mitt Romney in the same room at the same time.

[UPDATE - 1/21/2012, 2:30 pm CST]

Hmmmm….

The next speaker talked about how marriage equality should not be “the” goal of the community (who said it was?)

As if on cue:

Lets parse this, shall we?

Marriage equality will begin to help solve a lot of those problems.

If gay people were seen as equal and normal, and marriage would be a sign of that, there would have been less reason for that kid to be picked on for being gay.

Are kids picked on for being straight?  Then ENDA will become less important and not at all controversial.

There are a lot of things that we’re going to realize are covered by the umbrella of marriage.

DADT will prove the same.  Suddenly all those people in the military, including ones from families who vilified gay people, are going to realize that gay people are nothing special.  Marriage equality is going to go a long way toward making the world a better place for LGBT people regardless of the other words that describe them

You mean the way that DADT repeal made the military a better place for T people?

You mean like that?

Eh?

Transadvocate contributor: Kat  (157 Posts)