This weekend I spent a few hours volunteering with the Courage Campaign's "Camp Courage" in Oakland, a two-day training session for marriage equality organizers gearing up to take back California in the wake of the Prop 8 travesty.
Like the "Camp Obama" trainings it is based on, one of the core elements of Camp Courage is the "Story of Self" - who are you and why are you here? As I finished driving AV equipment from Oakland to San Leandro on Monday morning, I found myself reflecting on why I, as a straight woman, care about this issue.
I have two children - ages 5 and 7. I have no idea if they will grow up to love boys, or girls, or both. But I want to dance at their weddings and see them create families of their own. I realized suddenly that I stand at the famed Rawlsian Original Position on marriage equality. And from there, it is so easy to see what justice requires.
I've been following Camp Courage with great interest. It was the brainchild of some former Obama organizers in California, who helped put together Camp Obama trainings for the campaign. I've now helped organize something like 8 Camp O's, and I am a total believer in their power to move volunteers from interest to action. It gives them a new set of tools, based on longstanding progressive organizing ideas and joined with online and offline social networking.
During the campaign I told my Obama Story of Self over and over, and always found myself renewed and re-energized by the process. Who and I, and why am I here? Even better was hearing the stories others brought. I can't remember a Camp O where I didn't tear up at some point. From all accounts, including my own observations, Camp Courage is a similarly moving experience.
But I was helping behind the scenes - I wasn't able to be a "camper" this weekend and tell my story. If I had, it would go something like this:
I got married a little over ten years ago, in October of 1998, in Washington, DC. My marriage came with ready-made social acceptance and a full panoply of legal benefits. Our families and many friends traveled long distances to attend, with their spouses, partners, significant others, kids. It was a beautiful day in every sense of the word.
Marriage equality at that point touched my life only around the edges. The Unitarian Universalist church where we got married was already doing "services of union" for gay and lesbian couples. We were pleased to be married and worship in a place that welcomed all families. We had some same sex couples on our dance floor. I definitely felt it was wrong that I could get married and that other people we loved could not. But I expected that kind of change was perhaps a generation away.
Bowers v. Hardwick was still the law. DOMA was two years old, passed with overwhelming Democratic support. In Hawaii the backlash against the first case legalizing same-sex marriage was in full swing. If you had told me then that in only ten years, 5 states would have full marriage equality, with two more jurisdictions on the brink, I would have been astonished. If you had told me that California wasn't one of the five, but Iowa was, I would have been even more surprised. (Not to mention having already made it past that whole first black President breakthrough.)
And while this revolution has been unfolding, something else has changed for me. The problem of the "marriage line" doesn't feel like it touches my life just around the edges any more. For one thing, I have witnessed first hand how marriage changes how you and everyone else understands your relationship - I know what's stake. More importantly, the whole debate is suddenly much closer to home. You see, I have become a parent of two children. They are still too young to know who they might grow up to love. The fact that society might artificially exclude them from marriage at that point is unthinkable to me. Of course I always wanted this change for the couples at our wedding, and for others who are part of my life. But the tangible impact on my family is something new.
I have no idea if my kids, who are only 5 and 7 right now, will grow up to love boys, or girls, or both. Regardless, I want to dance at their weddings and see my children create families of their own. I can't take the chance that the kind of marriage they will want as adults might still be illegal. We have 10-15 years to get it done for them. Hopefully it won't take that long.
My copy of John Rawls' A Theory of Justice is pretty dusty. I bought it and read it for a political philosophy class in college nearly 20 years ago. But in that book he lays out a structural framework for achieving a just world. It is based on the idea of the "Original Position" - behind the "Veil of Ignorance." If you didn't know what economic position you would occupy in society, if you didn't know your color, religion, gender or sexual orientation, what rules would you want to live by?
The original position is a central feature of John Rawls's social contract account of justice, “justice as fairness,” set forth in A Theory of Justice (TJ). It is designed to be a fair and impartial point of view that is to be adopted in our reasoning about fundamental principles of justice. In taking up this point of view, we are to imagine ourselves in the position of free and equal persons who jointly agree upon and commit themselves to principles of social and political justice. The main distinguishing feature of the original position is “the veil of ignorance”: to insure impartiality of judgment, the parties are deprived of all knowledge of their personal characteristics and social and historical circumstances. . . . Rather than a state of nature Rawls situates the parties to his social contract so that they do not have access to knowledge that can distort their judgments and result in unfair principles. Rawls's original position is an initial situation wherein the parties are without information that enables them to tailor principles of justice favorable to their personal circumstances.
This is an idealized framework, that comes with a lot more bells and whistles than I can do justice to in this diary. But 20 years later I still respond to this core idea of the Original Position - putting yourself at risk of being harmed by inequality, removing your societal privileges, and then deciding what world you want to live in.
It seems to me that as a parent of young children, I stand at the closest possible real-world approximation to the Original Position on marriage equality. Because I cannot see into the future and know if the marriage they want will be protected by the state or nation they choose to live in, I want the rules to cover all possible outcomes for them. I want to work now for full marriage equality across the United States.
Only a year ago I would have argued (and did) that "civil unions for all" was the way to go - politically and philosophically. But the arc of the universe is bending faster than I thought it could, accompanied by shockingly rapid public opinion shifts. And Iowa's a true game changer. I have come to see that "marriage for all" is not just the right side of history, it's the right now of politics.
Not that it will be easy. The whole point of Camp Courage is that it will take organizers on the ground, working neighborhood by neighborhood, taking nothing for granted. But time is on our side. We already know that younger voters overwhelmingly view marriage equality as their preferred future. Nate Silver predicts that in less than ten years of state by state reform, we can be most of the way there.
And even if my kids grow up to choose opposite-sex partners, marriage equality is still the most just result. Someone else's children may want to go a different route and should have that right. I know many wonderful couples who are being wrongly shut out of marriage right now. And ultimately the world I want for my children is a place where equality reigns. Where they can dance at their friends' same-sex weddings, if not their own.
Do you live in California? "Meet in the Middle" - sign up to join this rally in Fresno on the Saturday following the CA Supreme Court ruling on Prop 8.