Marylee Shrider: Proposition 8 no civil rights issue
| Friday, Oct 17 2008 05:02 PM
Last Updated Friday, Mar 27 2009 12:57 PM
Loading Stories
Advertisement
What was I thinking?
It’s a question I’ve asked myself more than once since I agreed to participate in the Proposition 8 debate last week at Cal State Bakersfield. I am, after all, an ardent supporter of the California Marriage Protection Act and the debate was co-sponsored by the school’s Gay Lesbian Straight Student Alliance.
I suppose I thought the students might actually be interested in civil discourse on the issue. In my naiveté, I thought all that tolerance liberals are so proud of might be extended to me and to Ken Mettler, my partner on the dais.
I thought as an invited guest I might be treated like one.
I thought wrong. To say the crowd was hostile is an understatement. Suffice it to say I was relieved that night to find they were serving popcorn and not pie.
I had hoped by participating I might finally get answers to questions I’ve repeatedly asked in regard to the legalization of gay marriage. And by answers I mean responses that are not convoluted, confused or dismissive.
When the California Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in June, it stipulated that same-sex couples can’t force religious organizations to marry them against the organization’s faith beliefs. Does that mean, I asked the crowd, that members of those organizations are also guaranteed the free exercise of those faith beliefs without discrimination?
I asked those assembled to consider growing evidence that we are not.
• A same-sex couple in New Mexico asked the owners of Elane Photography in Albuquerque to photograph their commitment ceremony. The business owners declined the job, saying their Christian beliefs conflicted with the message communicated in the ceremony.
The end result? The same-sex couple filed a complaint with the New Mexico Human Rights Commission, accusing the photographers of discrimination. The court found for the same-sex couple and ordered the photographers to pay more than $6,600 in the couple’s attorney’s fees.
• The Boston Globereported that Harvard Law School opened the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Law Clinic “to address unique legal dilemmas” raised by the state’s legalization of gay marriage.
Among those dilemmas is “how to deal with school systems that refuse to use books and curriculums that address gender diversity in families.”
• Here in California, two Christian physicians declined to artificially inseminate a lesbian patient, citing their faith beliefs. Instead, they referred the woman to the doctor who was able to help the woman get pregnant and even offered to pay any extra costs.
Not good enough. The woman sued the doctors for discrimination and won. In September the State Supreme Court upheld that decision.
The list goes on. But my question was shrugged off by the crowd and my No-on-Prop-8 opponents, who simply said if a service is offered it must be offered to everyone.
In other words, faith beliefs and parental authority be damned.
My second question was likewise dismissed. And dissed.
“Where’s the justification,” I asked, “in changing the boundaries of traditional marriage to include homosexuals, but to continue to exclude other groups?”
After all, if marriage is merely a matter of consenting adults who love each other, why are, say, polygamists denied the right to marry?
The question was immediately labeled a red herring by the crowd and the opposing side, who said the business of administering polygamous relationships in California was simply too difficult, too “unworkable.”
Unworkable? Says who? With enough political clout anything is workable. Even changing the definition of marriage for all people for all time.
One thing made clear at the CSUB debate, besides the fact that tolerance is something for the other guy to worry about, was that the audience was firmly convinced Prop. 8 is an attack on civil rights, yet equality under the constitution ensures that every woman enjoys the same right to marry any man she wants and vice versa.
A woman from the audience illustrated the point when she stood at the microphone and angrily recounted the discrimination she’d recently suffered in a local emergency room when hospital staff wouldn’t allow her child's “other mother” to join her at his bedside.
“It was because we’re gay,” she shouted, near tears.
Odd. My husband and I have taken our injury-prone son to the emergency room no fewer than 10 times in the past 20 years. Each time, without exception, one of us was asked to remain in the waiting area, while the other stayed with our son.
The one-visitor-at-a-time rule is in place so doctors and nurses can tend to patients without wading through mobs of wigged-out relatives. In my experience, it’s a reasonable restriction that applies to everyone.
But the angry woman wasn’t satisfied with what applies to everyone. She wanted more.
These are Marylee Shrider’s opinions, not necessarily The Californian’s. Call her at 395-7474 or write mshrider@bakersfield.com.
