Greenwald writes: "By a 5-4 majority, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled today
that laws denying same-sex couples the right to marry violate the 'due
process' and 'equal protection' guarantees of the Fourteenth Amendment to
the Constitution. With or without the court ruling, full-scale marriage
equality was an inevitability thanks to rapid trans-ideological generational
change in how this issue was perceived; today's decision simply accelerated
the outcome."
ACT UP protest. (photo: J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
Gay Marriage Ruling: Expected and Yet Shocking
By Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept
27 June 15
By a 5-4 majority, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled today that laws denying
same-sex couples the right to marry violate the due process and equal
protection guarantees of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. With
or without the court ruling, full-scale marriage equality was an
inevitability thanks to rapid trans-ideological generational change in how
this issue was perceived; todays decision simply accelerated the outcome.
All the legal debates over the ruling are predictable and banal. Most people
proclaim in the words of Justice Scalias bizarre and somewhat deranged
dissent that it is a threat to democracy and a judicial putsch
whenever laws they like are judicially invalidated, but a profound
vindication for freedom when laws they dislike are nullified. Thats how
people like Scalia can, on one day, demand that campaign finance laws
enacted by Congress and supported by large majorities of citizens be struck
down (Citizens United), but the next day declare that judicial invalidation
of a democratically enacted law robs the People of the most important
liberty they asserted in the Declaration of Independence and won in the
Revolution of 1776: the freedom to govern themselves.
Far more interesting than that sort of naked hypocrisy masquerading as lofty
intellectual principles are the historical and cultural aspects of todays
decision. Although the result was expected on a rational level, todays
ruling is still viscerally shocking for any LGBT citizen who grew up in the
U.S., or their family members and close friends. Its almost hard to believe
that same-sex marriage is now legal in all 50 states. Just consider how
embedded, pervasive and recent anti-gay sentiment has been in the fabric of
American life.
In the 1970s just 40 years ago the existence of gay people was all but
unmentionable, particularly outside of small enclaves in New York, Los
Angeles and San Francisco. If your first inkling of a gay identity took
place in that decade, as mine did, you necessarily assumed that you were
alone, that you were plagued with some sort of rare, aberrational disease,
since there was no way even to know gayness existed except from the most
malicious and casual mockery of it. It simply wasnt meaningfully discussed:
anywhere. It was so unmentionable that Liberace, of all people, long
insisted to his fans that he was a bachelor due to his inability to
recover from his tragic break-up with his fianceé, the Norwegian figure
skater Sonja Henie. With exceedingly few exceptions, openly gay figures in
politics, sports, or entertainment were nonexistent (that is one reason why
one of my childhood heroes was Martina Navratilova, who in the early 1980s
came out as a lesbian despite being a young female immigrant from the Soviet
bloc to the U.S., faced with the certainty of losing enormous amounts by
being one of the few public figures to do so: she even had a trans woman as
her coach).
In the 1980s just 30 years ago the U.S. held its first-ever sustained,
serious public discussion of homosexuality. But that discussion was forced
by the advent of a hideous, terrorizing, mysterious disease, which in the
public mind and the mind of many young LGBTs came to define what it meant
to be gay. Even then, as thousands of Americans were dying, the taboo
against public discussions of homosexuality was so potent that politicians
like Ronald Reagan and Ed Koch were petrified even of discussing this public
health crisis, allowing it to grow and metastasize for years with almost no
governmental mobilizing against it. In 1986, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld
the right of states such as Georgia to criminalize gay sex and arrest and
prosecute those who engaged it, on the ground in the words of Chief
Justice Berger that there is no such thing as a fundamental right to
commit homosexual sodomy and that condemnation of those practices is
firmly rooted in Judeo-Christian moral and ethical standards.
In the 1990s just 20 years ago anti-gay sentiment was so widespread that
Bill Clinton signed two grotesquely bigoted and damaging laws: the Defense
of Marriage Act, which barred the federal government from offering any
benefits to same-sex couples (including crucial immigration and survivor
rights), and Dont Ask, Dont Tell, which codified the ban on LGBTs
serving in the military. DOMA passed the Senate on September 10, 1996 less
than 20 years ago by a vote of 85-14, with the support of every Republican
as well as people like Joe Biden, Chris Dodd, Pat Leahy, Patty Murray and
Paul Wellstone. In 1992, the state of Colorado actually enacted a
constitutional amendment Amendment 2 overturning all existing local laws
and banning all future ones that outlawed anti-gay discrimination. Gallup
never polled on same-sex marriage until 1996, and when it did, found that
Americans opposed it by a whopping 68-27 percent majority.
In the 2000s just 10 years ago opposition to gay marriage was so
pervasive that every state referendum on the question rejected it. Putting
it on the ballot became a vital GOP strategy for winning elections, a tactic
engineered by then-closeted gay GOP Chairman Ken Mehlman, who later came out
and apologized. It was only in 2003 exactly 12 years ago today when the
Supreme Court reversed its 1986 ruling and held that the criminalization of
gay sex is unconstitutional (and even then, only by a 5-4 majority)
meaning that its only been 12 years that gay people have had the right to
have sex in America without being prosecuted for it. In both the 2004 and
2008 election, the presidential nominees for both parties were adamantly
opposed to same-sex marriage.
In 2008 just seven years ago Barack Obama said at an event at Rick
Warrens church: I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a
woman. Now, for me as a Christian, it is also a sacred union. Gods in the
mix. . . . I am not somebody who promotes same-sex marriage, but I do
believe in civil unions. In November of that year, Obama told MTV: I
believe marriage is between a man and a woman. I am not in favor of gay
marriage. The same year, the people of California passed a referendum
nullifying the states same-sex marriage law, instantly invalidating the
marriage of thousands of their fellow gay citizens.
In June 2011 just four years ago Obama aide Dan Pfeiffer told a
gathering of liberal bloggers: The president has never favored same-sex
marriage. He is against it.
It was only in May 2012 just three years ago that Joe Biden went on Meet
the Press and, by all accounts, surprised everyone by announcing that he had
changed his mind and now favored same-sex marriage. That announcement, along
with rapidly changing poll numbers (majorities favored marriage equality
when Biden made his announcement), caused numerous national Democratic
leaders (and ultimately Obama himself), for the first time, to announce
their support for marriage equality. So up until three years ago even as
numerous other countries on multiple continents around the world enacted it
almost every national American political figure opposed same-sex marriage.
Now, as of today, same-sex marriage is legal in all states. That is massive,
fundamental change in an amount of time so short as to be dizzying. As the
great LGBT activist Michelangelo Signorile warns in his new book, Its Not
Over, the advent of gay marriage no more means an end to harmful anti-gay
bigotry than the end of Jim Crow laws (or the election of a black president)
ended racism. Particularly for poorer LGBT citizens, ones who live outside
of coastal cities, and transsexuals, discrimination remains potent (which is
why the image of establishment, Democrat-loyal LGBT leaders jeering a Latina
immigrant trans activist this week for interrupting President Obama, for
whom they obsequiously swooned, was simultaneously so ugly and revealing).
And the broader lessons to be drawn for political activism from acceptance
of marriage equality are limited by the issues irrelevance to the nations
financial elite (who, to the extent they care at all, largely support it)
and the hard-core neutering of establishment gay organizations as the price
for acceptance.
Still, that the Supreme Court has now ruled that the Constitution bars
discrimination even in marriage laws is a remarkable development for a
country that has for centuries imposed untold ostracization, misery and
legal punishment on its citizens for the crime of being gay. It demonstrates
that real political change typically comes from citizens, not leaders. It
highlights how difficult it is to demonize and Otherize people when theyre
not invisible. And it exposes the myth of defeatism: that people are
incapable of undermining and subverting entrenched institutional injustices.
Its breathtaking to consider the amount of courage and human suffering that
led to todays decision. In the late 1940s, Harry Hay created the Mattachine
Society, which combined highly progressive politics with a campaign for gay
rights in an indescribably hostile and oppressive climate. The Stonewall
Riots of 1969, driven by outrage over endless police harassment, were led by
the most marginalized members of the community, and sparked the modern LGBT
movement. In the late 1980s and 1990s, ACT UP driven primarily by sick gay
men and their lesbian allies pioneered political activism with a union of
defiance, dissent, shrewd expertise and strategizing that unquestionably
saved countless lives around the world and emboldened an entire generation
of gay people (passively attending ACT UP meetings at Cooper Union during my
law school years was incredibly formative).
The experience of being gay in the U.S. has long been one of intense stigma,
condemnation and exclusion; for many, it was worse than that. The tragically
conclusive empirical data on the highly disproportionate suicide rates for
gay adolescents, by itself, tells much of that story. To witness the arrival
of full-scale legal equality is something many never expected to see in
their lifetime, and now that it has happened, still seems surreal.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
ACT UP protest. (photo: J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/06/26/todays-supreme-court-ruling-th
ough-expected-still-shocking/https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/06/26/t
odays-supreme-court-ruling-though-expected-still-shocking/
Gay Marriage Ruling: Expected and Yet Shocking
By Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept
27 June 15
y a 5-4 majority, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled today that laws denying
same-sex couples the right to marry violate the due process and equal
protection guarantees of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. With
or without the court ruling, full-scale marriage equality was an
inevitability thanks to rapid trans-ideological generational change in how
this issue was perceived; todays decision simply accelerated the outcome.
All the legal debates over the ruling are predictable and banal. Most people
proclaim in the words of Justice Scalias bizarre and somewhat deranged
dissent that it is a threat to democracy and a judicial putsch
whenever laws they like are judicially invalidated, but a profound
vindication for freedom when laws they dislike are nullified. Thats how
people like Scalia can, on one day, demand that campaign finance laws
enacted by Congress and supported by large majorities of citizens be struck
down (Citizens United), but the next day declare that judicial invalidation
of a democratically enacted law robs the People of the most important
liberty they asserted in the Declaration of Independence and won in the
Revolution of 1776: the freedom to govern themselves.
Far more interesting than that sort of naked hypocrisy masquerading as lofty
intellectual principles are the historical and cultural aspects of todays
decision. Although the result was expected on a rational level, todays
ruling is still viscerally shocking for any LGBT citizen who grew up in the
U.S., or their family members and close friends. Its almost hard to believe
that same-sex marriage is now legal in all 50 states. Just consider how
embedded, pervasive and recent anti-gay sentiment has been in the fabric of
American life.
In the 1970s just 40 years ago the existence of gay people was all but
unmentionable, particularly outside of small enclaves in New York, Los
Angeles and San Francisco. If your first inkling of a gay identity took
place in that decade, as mine did, you necessarily assumed that you were
alone, that you were plagued with some sort of rare, aberrational disease,
since there was no way even to know gayness existed except from the most
malicious and casual mockery of it. It simply wasnt meaningfully discussed:
anywhere. It was so unmentionable that Liberace, of all people, long
insisted to his fans that he was a bachelor due to his inability to
recover from his tragic break-up with his fianceé, the Norwegian figure
skater Sonja Henie. With exceedingly few exceptions, openly gay figures in
politics, sports, or entertainment were nonexistent (that is one reason why
one of my childhood heroes was Martina Navratilova, who in the early 1980s
came out as a lesbian despite being a young female immigrant from the Soviet
bloc to the U.S., faced with the certainty of losing enormous amounts by
being one of the few public figures to do so: she even had a trans woman as
her coach).
In the 1980s just 30 years ago the U.S. held its first-ever sustained,
serious public discussion of homosexuality. But that discussion was forced
by the advent of a hideous, terrorizing, mysterious disease, which in the
public mind and the mind of many young LGBTs came to define what it meant
to be gay. Even then, as thousands of Americans were dying, the taboo
against public discussions of homosexuality was so potent that politicians
like Ronald Reagan and Ed Koch were petrified even of discussing this public
health crisis, allowing it to grow and metastasize for years with almost no
governmental mobilizing against it. In 1986, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld
the right of states such as Georgia to criminalize gay sex and arrest and
prosecute those who engaged it, on the ground in the words of Chief
Justice Berger that there is no such thing as a fundamental right to
commit homosexual sodomy and that condemnation of those practices is
firmly rooted in Judeo-Christian moral and ethical standards.
In the 1990s just 20 years ago anti-gay sentiment was so widespread that
Bill Clinton signed two grotesquely bigoted and damaging laws: the Defense
of Marriage Act, which barred the federal government from offering any
benefits to same-sex couples (including crucial immigration and survivor
rights), and Dont Ask, Dont Tell, which codified the ban on LGBTs
serving in the military. DOMA passed the Senate on September 10, 1996 less
than 20 years ago by a vote of 85-14, with the support of every Republican
as well as people like Joe Biden, Chris Dodd, Pat Leahy, Patty Murray and
Paul Wellstone. In 1992, the state of Colorado actually enacted a
constitutional amendment Amendment 2 overturning all existing local laws
and banning all future ones that outlawed anti-gay discrimination. Gallup
never polled on same-sex marriage until 1996, and when it did, found that
Americans opposed it by a whopping 68-27 percent majority.
In the 2000s just 10 years ago opposition to gay marriage was so
pervasive that every state referendum on the question rejected it. Putting
it on the ballot became a vital GOP strategy for winning elections, a tactic
engineered by then-closeted gay GOP Chairman Ken Mehlman, who later came out
and apologized. It was only in 2003 exactly 12 years ago today when the
Supreme Court reversed its 1986 ruling and held that the criminalization of
gay sex is unconstitutional (and even then, only by a 5-4 majority)
meaning that its only been 12 years that gay people have had the right to
have sex in America without being prosecuted for it. In both the 2004 and
2008 election, the presidential nominees for both parties were adamantly
opposed to same-sex marriage.
In 2008 just seven years ago Barack Obama said at an event at Rick
Warrens church: I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a
woman. Now, for me as a Christian, it is also a sacred union. Gods in the
mix. . . . I am not somebody who promotes same-sex marriage, but I do
believe in civil unions. In November of that year, Obama told MTV: I
believe marriage is between a man and a woman. I am not in favor of gay
marriage. The same year, the people of California passed a referendum
nullifying the states same-sex marriage law, instantly invalidating the
marriage of thousands of their fellow gay citizens.
In June 2011 just four years ago Obama aide Dan Pfeiffer told a
gathering of liberal bloggers: The president has never favored same-sex
marriage. He is against it.
It was only in May 2012 just three years ago that Joe Biden went on Meet
the Press and, by all accounts, surprised everyone by announcing that he had
changed his mind and now favored same-sex marriage. That announcement, along
with rapidly changing poll numbers (majorities favored marriage equality
when Biden made his announcement), caused numerous national Democratic
leaders (and ultimately Obama himself), for the first time, to announce
their support for marriage equality. So up until three years ago even as
numerous other countries on multiple continents around the world enacted it
almost every national American political figure opposed same-sex marriage.
Now, as of today, same-sex marriage is legal in all states. That is massive,
fundamental change in an amount of time so short as to be dizzying. As the
great LGBT activist Michelangelo Signorile warns in his new book, Its Not
Over, the advent of gay marriage no more means an end to harmful anti-gay
bigotry than the end of Jim Crow laws (or the election of a black president)
ended racism. Particularly for poorer LGBT citizens, ones who live outside
of coastal cities, and transsexuals, discrimination remains potent (which is
why the image of establishment, Democrat-loyal LGBT leaders jeering a Latina
immigrant trans activist this week for interrupting President Obama, for
whom they obsequiously swooned, was simultaneously so ugly and revealing).
And the broader lessons to be drawn for political activism from acceptance
of marriage equality are limited by the issues irrelevance to the nations
financial elite (who, to the extent they care at all, largely support it)
and the hard-core neutering of establishment gay organizations as the price
for acceptance.
Still, that the Supreme Court has now ruled that the Constitution bars
discrimination even in marriage laws is a remarkable development for a
country that has for centuries imposed untold ostracization, misery and
legal punishment on its citizens for the crime of being gay. It demonstrates
that real political change typically comes from citizens, not leaders. It
highlights how difficult it is to demonize and Otherize people when theyre
not invisible. And it exposes the myth of defeatism: that people are
incapable of undermining and subverting entrenched institutional injustices.
Its breathtaking to consider the amount of courage and human suffering that
led to todays decision. In the late 1940s, Harry Hay created the Mattachine
Society, which combined highly progressive politics with a campaign for gay
rights in an indescribably hostile and oppressive climate. The Stonewall
Riots of 1969, driven by outrage over endless police harassment, were led by
the most marginalized members of the community, and sparked the modern LGBT
movement. In the late 1980s and 1990s, ACT UP driven primarily by sick gay
men and their lesbian allies pioneered political activism with a union of
defiance, dissent, shrewd expertise and strategizing that unquestionably
saved countless lives around the world and emboldened an entire generation
of gay people (passively attending ACT UP meetings at Cooper Union during my
law school years was incredibly formative).
The experience of being gay in the U.S. has long been one of intense stigma,
condemnation and exclusion; for many, it was worse than that. The tragically
conclusive empirical data on the highly disproportionate suicide rates for
gay adolescents, by itself, tells much of that story. To witness the arrival
of full-scale legal equality is something many never expected to see in
their lifetime, and now that it has happened, still seems surreal.
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
