Discriminations

No, I haven’t forgotten that I said I was going to have more to say about the Seattle/Louisville opinions and the response to them. I will, and I hope soon.

Part, but only part, of my delay in getting to that is that Helene and I have been getting ready for a trip out to California to see Jessie (and some other Californians), which involved arranging house-sitting and dog-sitting for Mosby, the wonderdog. All that done, we arrived in Pasadena today, and will be traveling around Calif. for a while. (We managed to pry Jessie away from her 12-hour lab days for about a week or so, and we’ll travel some on our own.)

Picking up a copy of Pasadena Weekly upon our arrival, this article by Sally Sheklow, who writes about “the funny side of one everyday lesbian life,” reminded me of a point I made most recently here: how liberals, or “progressives,” support different versions of equality, and hence of civil rights, for gays and minorities.

In my recent post, linked above, quoting half-Hispanic presidential candidate Bill Richardson boasting that he is “for civil rights and affirmative action” and promising that “we are a nation that is not going to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation.” I noted that it is

interesting that Richardson distinguished affirmative action from civil rights, implicitly recognizing that it is possible to support one and not the other. That distinction made his additional promise — that “we are a nation that is not going to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation” — sound a bit less emphatic than I suspect he intended, making gays and lesbians into second-class recipients of civil rights protection.

How did he do that? you ask. Here’s how. In supporting affirmative action, Richardson supports policies that treat some people better than others because of their race or ethnicity (many of whose beneficiaries, as it happens, share his own Hispanic, or partly Hispanic, ethnicity). Gays and lesbians, on the other hand, apparently don’t deserve this special treatment. They have to settle for being treated with neutral, sex-blind non-discrimination.

Which brings me back to Ms. Sheklow, and her article describing her recent marriage in Canada. Here’s an excerpt, with some highlights that I’ve emphasized:

My bride and I had crossed the border into a country where nobody treads on your right to marry. You simply set a date with any official marriage commissioner, show up with your notarized license and get legally married the same as any other couple can. Pretty cool. So remarkably, shockingly, unabashedly normal.

Not that I’m pushing assimilation. My message isn’t that lesbian, gay, bi, trans and queer people are “just like” heteros. Why set the bar so low? LGBTQ folks have our own special contributions to make, questions to raise, comfort zones to tweak.

But still, queer as we are, British Columbia treated Wifey and me like everyone else, equals under the law. A shining moment of full equality — what a terrific feeling.

We were so happy. Although if you’d seen us that afternoon in the marriage commissioner’s living room, you would have never guessed it. We both cried through the whole ceremony. I mean really — two big, tough dykes like us. A simple civil service and the two of us carried on like we were at some funeral. Tears of joy, I guess, but something even more than that. Something hopeful and affirming that honest-to-goodness justice — equal rights for everyone — is actually a living possibility.

Since Ms. (now Mrs.?) Sheklow believes that “lesbian, gay, bi, trans and queer people are [NOT] ‘just like’ heteros” and thus presumably have much they can contribute to “diversity,” you might think that she would favor affirmative action for them. But, on the evidence of this article at least, she does not. She wants to be treated “the same as any other couple,” as “equals under the law,” glorying in “A shining moment of full equality.” This is not the language of preferential treatment.

“Back here in Oregon,” she explained,

fair-minded people have been trying for some 34 years to end the state’s reign of legal discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender expression. Just last month Oregon’s Legislature passed the Oregon Equality Act and the Oregon Family Fairness Act. These long-awaited laws will protect our rights to equal access to employment, housing and public accommodation and provide legal recognition of domestic partnerships. It’s not quite total equality, but it’s a huge step.

What those “fair-minded people” have been trying to do is not to promote preferential treatment for gays but “to end the state’s reign of legal discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender expression.”

Why is that we demand that same non-discriminatory for everyone we’re called racists who want “to turn back the clock,” and worse, but when the Bill Richardsons and Sally Sheklows call for non-discriminatory treatment of gays they’re applauded as, and by, liberals and “progressives”?