Iowa Family Values begins like this:
IF it weren’t for Iowa, my family may never have existed, and this gay, biracial New Yorker might never have been born.
The author, Steven Thrasher, is a writer and media producer. And he tells us about his parents' 1958 marriage in Council Bluffs Iowa. His Black Father and White Mother could not get married in Nebraska, where they lived - that state would not abolish its antimiscegination laws for an additional 5 years (although even that was before the 1967 SCOTUS decision of Loving v Virginia which finally outlawed the racial bar). The obstacles they faced at home?
My mom’s brother tried to have the Nebraska state police bar her from leaving the state so she couldn’t marry my dad, which was only the latest legal indignity she had endured. She had been arrested on my parents’ first date, accused of prostitution. (The conventional thought of the time being: Why else would a white woman be seen with a black man?)
His parents were married for 45 years. As a gay man, he notes that many like him flee "flyover country" for the coasts, but
But as a gay man, I can’t marry in "liberal" New York, where I’m a resident, or in "liberal" California, where I was born, and very soon I will have that right in "conservative" Iowa.
In his penultimate paragraph Thrasher writes
Of course, the desire to define relational rights and responsibilities with a partner, to have access to the protection that this kind of commitment affords, is rather conservative. But it’s a conservative dream that should be offered to all Americans. Though it takes great courage for gays to marry in a handful of states now, one hopes that someday, throughout the nation, gay marriages, like my parents’ union, will just be seen as marriages.
Just marriages. What a remarkable idea.
Thrasher is biracial and gay. As I look at the students before me in my 6 classes, and at others around the school, I see students who are biracial, students who are gay, and students who are both.
I grew up in a liberal community in suburban New York. We had some blacks, but almost no social mixing outside of athletics. Even dating across the clear religious divides - Catholic, Protestant, Jewish - was considered very unusual and likely to draw scrutiny. While we had students we suspected were gay, I do not remember any of my 349 classmates who was "out" even though there were a few that most suspected. Teasing about sexual orientation - or should I say "bullying"? - was far too acceptable.
The school in which I teach is majority African American, and in totality quite diverse. One regularly sees couples that cross racial, national, and religious lines. We will also see openly gay couples, although usually the females are somewhat more willing to be open about their relationships. Gay students will, at least in my classes, talk about their sexual orientation, particularly when discussing social issues or political candidates and parties - some of those discussions can be very eye- and mind-opening. We have an active support group called LeTSGaB which contains Lesbians, Transgenders, Straights and Gays. Our code of conduct prohibits bullying or teasing on sexual orientation - it is in included as a category of sexual harrassment.
I see inevitability. Even some of my very church-oriented African-American students are further along than the voters of California. They are from a religious viewpoint opposed to gay marriage, but find themselves conflicted because they know and like students who are gay, and have a hard time accepting that their friends can be denied something they consider to be a basic human right. After all, as one church-going female commented in class, aren't gays also entitled to the pursuit of happiness?
Last night I shared the videos in the Keith Olbermann gets an award piece with my wife. I remember watching that Special Comment in real time. Still, seeing it again remained powerful. Hearing Keith's words when accepting the award, acknowledging his own failure in not having said something BEFORE California voted and offering the words of Steve Schmidt, struck home something even more important. It is this:
It is the responsibility of ALL of us to speak out anytime someone is denied rights of any kind. We can remember the words of Martin Niemoller perhaps, in the version he preferred
In Germany, they came first for the Communists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist;
And then they came for the trade unionists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist;
And then they came for the Jews, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew;
And then . . . they came for me . . . And by that time there was no one left to speak up.
For me that is insufficient. To acquiesce in denial of the rights of another is to somehow see that person as less fully worthy, less fully human, than oneself. Perhaps it is because I am of Jewish background that such denial offends, even angers, me. Perhaps it is because I was growing up when this nation was in the throes of the Civil Rights struggle and I saw people my age and a bit older having mobs try to keep them from attending schools and colleges, having police dogs and fire hoses turned upon them, getting beaten up and even killed. Perhaps it is because as I look around the world I still too often see people demonized and then brutalized because they are seen as different, as "other", and therefore as less.
I am told that genetically a chimpanzee and I are 98% the same. I know that genetically any human and I are well more than 99% the same. I examine my aspirations and my failings and try to imagine how I can justify thinking myself superior because of one and not inferior because of the other. The answer to that is that difference is neither superior nor inferior, it is merely difference. My students are different, yet all are entitled to the best teaching I can give them. I rail against standardization of education precisely because it loses sight of the absolute uniqueness of each of my students. And I delight in classes that are diverse on many level because as we share together we experience a more complete picture of the human condition, and we are thereby all enriched.
We sometimes hear of a bride who wears the lace of her mother or grandmother, of rings passed down from generation to generation, so that the ceremonial binding together of a couple is enfolded into something bigger than the two of them. Thrasher ends his piece with a hope that is similar, and well worth pondering:
It’s safe to say that neither the dramas of our family, nor its triumphs, could have been possible without the simultaneously radical and conservative occasion of my parents’ civil marriage in Iowa. And so when the time comes, I hope to be married at the City Hall in Council Bluffs, in the state that not only supports my civil rights now, but which supported my parents’ so many years ago.
the simultaneously radical and conservative occasion What a remarkable way of thinking. It may be radical for us to think of a time when these petty distinctions will no longer frame our laws and customs and behaviors towards others. And yet it is fundamentally conservative - think again of the pursuit of happiness. Think of basic human dignity.
Consider the following snippet, rendered in modern English, from remarks in 1851:
If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them.
Sojourner Truth, mother of 13, former slave, advocated for something radical, the equality of women.
We have now a Black president, something perhaps unthinkable to most when I was growing up. Then we had one woman senator, now the numbers are in the double digits. Soon, hopefully before I pass on, we will have to decide whether the spouse is the first man or the first whatever, as a female occupies the Oval office. Or perhaps our first female president will herself have a first lady. . . why not? What does sexual orientation have to do with political competence, except for those who fear the "other"?
Steven Thrasher offers a poignant expression that is timely. Or rather, that is more "it's about time." Because it is long overdue that we should past having to argue about basic rights for anyone.
I look forward to the day when Steven Thrasher will go to Council Bluffs for his marriage solely out of choice and to honor his parents. I look forward to the day when he can go to any courthouse in the United States and obtain and execute a marriage license.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. . . Why should those denied those rights give their consent? Why should our system say some are more equal than others?
If the Supreme Court of Iowa can unanimously see the wrongness of denying rights to anyone, is not it about time that the rest of us acknowledge how wrong such denial is?
For my students, for those young and older people unable to yet fully experience the pursuit of happiness because of archaic attitudes derived from fear, and for all of us whose own lives will be enriched by an increase of happiness and stability of relationships of others, and because it is simply a basic right that should not be denied . . thank you Steven Thrasher for your poignant column.
Peace.
