blamebrampton (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
blamebrampton) wrote2008-10-28 12:40 pm
blamebrampton) wrote2008-10-28 12:40 pm
A drive-by post on Proposition 8
I am still a mile behind on replying to the brilliant comments from many of you on elite comms (but I will get to them before I leave for Italy!), and have been buried deep in my Darkfest fic, which may yet kill me. However, I have been reading posts from a number of my Californian flist about how Proposition 8 would affect their lives, and I wanted to add another small perspective. (ETA: thanks ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
daybreaq for pointing out that Florida has a similar proposition, Amendment 2.)
Much of the literature against gay marriage treats it as some new phenomenon, a sign of the end times, or a wacky new millennial trend that should be stamped out, like bubble skirts.
This is not true. If I had time, I'd insert an essay here on the history of gay and lesbian relationships and their on-again, off-again relationship with secular and religious blessings. But instead I'll just point out that there are many, many children of gay parents out there who are in their thirties, forties, fifties and above. I 'm one of them.
I was just a small baby when my mother realised the reason her marriage to my father was falling apart wasn't just that they had bugger-all in common, it was that she actually fancied women. For both my parents, this was a relief. Mum was at last able to understand a large part of herself that had been a mystery to her. Dad didn't have to face the horrifying possibility of a heterosexual woman who found him unattractive.
Now my father was older than my mother, richer, more stable, and further along in his life's plan. When he suggested that he could be my primary carer, she agreed it was the most sensible option. But it was also the only option. Her mother told her flat out that if she had maintained custody of me, they (my maternal grandparents) would take me away from her in the courts. They meant it, and they would have won.
So I grew up a continent away from my mother. I had a jolly good time, my Dad was great and his parents were fabulous fun for a kid, and between my huge extended family and Dad's big and bolshie peer group, it was a good upbringing that made me resilient, upbeat and capable. I saw my mother most years, while Dad was alive he would fly her over when she had time, and after he died his parents helped, too.
But if I am being honest, there are times when I would have liked a mother. And there were many, many more times when my mother would have liked a daughter. However, lesbians 'didn't have' real relationships in those days. They weren't wives, they weren't mothers, ask any legislator. So I was always a daughter for the holidays, or for a long weekend, and she was a mother of flying visits and frequent goodbyes, missing more than she was there for.
My first memories of my mother, and my experience of her now, is of someone who is dreadful at relationships. Because she really is. But in between, from when I was quite young till when I was a teenager, she had a wonderful girlfriend who I'll call A. She loved A dearly. I loved A, too, and so did my Dad and my Grandparents. A was a wonderful, wonderful person. If they had been able to marry, I think that it would have made my mother very happy. I know that it would have made them both think much longer and harder about breaking up, which they did because they were both stubborn and hot tempered and because it involved calling for a truck and packing one person's belongings and then it was done, with no more effort than that, ten years dissolved and not a signature required.
Because she had just been a girlfriend, A had no rights with me at all. She stayed in touch with me for five years after she and my mother broke up, but without a sense of formal belonging, she felt embarrassed at times, as though she was intruding. I found this out after she died, if I had known at the time I'd have told her she was always welcome. But I was young and self-involved as all young people are, so I accepted her moving on and away. Because she was just a girlfriend.
If they had been married, breaking up would have been hard. It would have required thought and time and effort and they may well have resolved it was a bad plan once the initial fight had simmered down. A would have been my step-mother, someone official. She would have been someone I could have opted to live with when my father died while I was still very young, someone who could have signed school forms and been involved, I would have been 'her' child in a real sense, rather than the child of her partner.
Years later there was another woman, we'll call her B. She moved her whole life at Mum's whim and when their relationship dissolved five years later she was left in a strange country with no resources, no career, no infrastructure, and no access to the shared assets that she had helped tend through the course of the relationship. If she had been a man, her rights would have been recognised under de facto legislation in place at the time. But she wasn't a man and she wasn't a wife, so she was left in the lurch.
Last year, I watched the Australian government and opposition talk about recognition of same-sex relationships and families, and one senator stood up and said that he wanted to protect the family.
And that made me angry, because my family is a family, too. And while my mother and I might have a slightly mad relationship, it's pretty bloody good when you consider that it was forged in spite of a culture and legal framework that wanted to destroy it altogether.
These days, it's not the occasional formerly married lesbian who has children, it's a great many women who have decided to commit to a family together. And it's a great many men, too, who have to go to even greater effort. Their children deserve the legal protection that a marriage brings. They deserve to know that their family is a family, too, in the eyes of the state, so that they never need worry that the framework that spells home to them can be denied. They need to know that both of their parents will be able to pick them up from school, sign their consent forms in hospital, keep them should tragedy strike.
Voting against gay marriage is a vote against families.
Think of the children.
daybreaq for pointing out that Florida has a similar proposition, Amendment 2.)Much of the literature against gay marriage treats it as some new phenomenon, a sign of the end times, or a wacky new millennial trend that should be stamped out, like bubble skirts.
This is not true. If I had time, I'd insert an essay here on the history of gay and lesbian relationships and their on-again, off-again relationship with secular and religious blessings. But instead I'll just point out that there are many, many children of gay parents out there who are in their thirties, forties, fifties and above. I 'm one of them.
I was just a small baby when my mother realised the reason her marriage to my father was falling apart wasn't just that they had bugger-all in common, it was that she actually fancied women. For both my parents, this was a relief. Mum was at last able to understand a large part of herself that had been a mystery to her. Dad didn't have to face the horrifying possibility of a heterosexual woman who found him unattractive.
Now my father was older than my mother, richer, more stable, and further along in his life's plan. When he suggested that he could be my primary carer, she agreed it was the most sensible option. But it was also the only option. Her mother told her flat out that if she had maintained custody of me, they (my maternal grandparents) would take me away from her in the courts. They meant it, and they would have won.
So I grew up a continent away from my mother. I had a jolly good time, my Dad was great and his parents were fabulous fun for a kid, and between my huge extended family and Dad's big and bolshie peer group, it was a good upbringing that made me resilient, upbeat and capable. I saw my mother most years, while Dad was alive he would fly her over when she had time, and after he died his parents helped, too.
But if I am being honest, there are times when I would have liked a mother. And there were many, many more times when my mother would have liked a daughter. However, lesbians 'didn't have' real relationships in those days. They weren't wives, they weren't mothers, ask any legislator. So I was always a daughter for the holidays, or for a long weekend, and she was a mother of flying visits and frequent goodbyes, missing more than she was there for.
My first memories of my mother, and my experience of her now, is of someone who is dreadful at relationships. Because she really is. But in between, from when I was quite young till when I was a teenager, she had a wonderful girlfriend who I'll call A. She loved A dearly. I loved A, too, and so did my Dad and my Grandparents. A was a wonderful, wonderful person. If they had been able to marry, I think that it would have made my mother very happy. I know that it would have made them both think much longer and harder about breaking up, which they did because they were both stubborn and hot tempered and because it involved calling for a truck and packing one person's belongings and then it was done, with no more effort than that, ten years dissolved and not a signature required.
Because she had just been a girlfriend, A had no rights with me at all. She stayed in touch with me for five years after she and my mother broke up, but without a sense of formal belonging, she felt embarrassed at times, as though she was intruding. I found this out after she died, if I had known at the time I'd have told her she was always welcome. But I was young and self-involved as all young people are, so I accepted her moving on and away. Because she was just a girlfriend.
If they had been married, breaking up would have been hard. It would have required thought and time and effort and they may well have resolved it was a bad plan once the initial fight had simmered down. A would have been my step-mother, someone official. She would have been someone I could have opted to live with when my father died while I was still very young, someone who could have signed school forms and been involved, I would have been 'her' child in a real sense, rather than the child of her partner.
Years later there was another woman, we'll call her B. She moved her whole life at Mum's whim and when their relationship dissolved five years later she was left in a strange country with no resources, no career, no infrastructure, and no access to the shared assets that she had helped tend through the course of the relationship. If she had been a man, her rights would have been recognised under de facto legislation in place at the time. But she wasn't a man and she wasn't a wife, so she was left in the lurch.
Last year, I watched the Australian government and opposition talk about recognition of same-sex relationships and families, and one senator stood up and said that he wanted to protect the family.
And that made me angry, because my family is a family, too. And while my mother and I might have a slightly mad relationship, it's pretty bloody good when you consider that it was forged in spite of a culture and legal framework that wanted to destroy it altogether.
These days, it's not the occasional formerly married lesbian who has children, it's a great many women who have decided to commit to a family together. And it's a great many men, too, who have to go to even greater effort. Their children deserve the legal protection that a marriage brings. They deserve to know that their family is a family, too, in the eyes of the state, so that they never need worry that the framework that spells home to them can be denied. They need to know that both of their parents will be able to pick them up from school, sign their consent forms in hospital, keep them should tragedy strike.
Voting against gay marriage is a vote against families.
Think of the children.
no subject
Not just because I'm Australian, but because I have a small amount of knowledge about it. I recently had my HSC for Legal Studies, and we did a section of Family Law, and I chose my case study to be on same-sex relationships.
Currently, in Australia, same sex relationships are banned under the Marriage Act 1961 Cth, which is based on a case in English common law from 1866. So, archaic common law. basically, in July our current PM (Rudd) said that he was taking no steps to abolish the laws because it was still the belief of his party that the law is just (which, according to our statute recognition of 'just' laws, it's not. For one, it disadvantages minority groups to a very large extent). The government I think you're referring to is the Coalition, or Liberal party. They're gone now, and with the Howard.
We do have some recognition. I myself am heterosexual, so please excuse me if this comes across at all as pitying the minority. According to the latest census, 0.5% of our population is in a same-sex relationship.
The difficulty your mother experienced is now covered by the De Facto Relationships Act. It covers superannuation, hospital and coronial rights, taxation and some child rights. I still feel the biggest descrimination against same-sex couples is against their children, which I suppose is your situation exactly. There's lots of common law I could refer to, and you'd have absolutely no idea.
But, this point brings me up to the basis of my argument. I read a website called Culture Watch, and a poster had recently observed a case where a child was born to two lesbians, and then those mothers had gone off with other partners. He considered it a "degradation of the family unit" that a child should have four mothers and no "fathers". His disagreement with the relationships was that it was damaging to the child, &tc, &tc. I heartily disagreed with him, and his 12 other religiously opposed commenters. But it really does open the eyes to the prejudiced world.
And then, I was at school the other day. When questioned about my belief, I said that I supposed what people got up to by themselves (or.. between the sheets) was their own business. And a religious teacher said to me "So you wouldn't mind if I got a baby and slit it across its stomach?" Revulsion, obviously, but his point was that I had morals.
So, back to the beginning. Most of the time, in Australian law too, for the record, the society evolves and the law lags behind. Law isn't preemptive, but these relationships have been around for a very long time. I'm opposed to the current laws, but really, there is very little I can do. While it is a democratic society, it's also a very insular society. If I went to my member, what the hell would they do? They wouldn't follow up the word of a pretensious 17 year old who's learned a little of the world in her year 12 studies. They'd pat me on the head and it wouldn't make it past the district.
I don't know what to do. But I hope I've added a little more meat to what you know of Australian politics. If you want to know anything else, I'm happy to tell you, or find out more for you :).
no subject
Thanks for popping in. I have to say, that's a TERRIBLE argument from your religious teacher there. Arguing that sexual equality is akin to infanticide is just setting up a false set of premises.
When people present arguments like that to you, ones that are clearly constructed by taking premise A and B and conclusion C, and thereby inferring that they have proved Z, you might like to do as I do and declare that this argument has become too ridiculous for you to proceed with. Alternatively, ask them if they support marriages between people of mixed race, or mixed religion, since those were once subject to the same level of stigma as some people see in gay marriage.
You being non-judgemental of same-sex relationships doesn't make you amoral, it makes you non-judgemental. If you were arguing in favour of baby-slashing, perhaps you would be amoral, but you weren't.
Your religious teacher might be surprised to learn that the same percentage of gays and lesbians as of straight people vehemently oppose baby slashing.
I fully agree with your comments that law follows society, though Culture Watch represents a minority conservative Christian view. I am yet to read a survey that shows a majority of Australians *against* equal rights for gay couples, all the ones I have seen have been in favour of removing discrimination, I think it's the Justice Kirby effect. Having sad that, none of them have been massive surveys.
I like to think that the doctrine of a fair go for all will be the deciding factor for Australians in this issue. Rudd and co have already put forward legislation removing the secular discriminations against gay couples, but he has said no to marriage because he defines it as a religious matter. While the first issue is, to my mind, the more important one, I think that the second will come into play as many Australians ask themselves whether they are happy to define marriage only by the churches' definitions. And given how many straight unions in Oz are wholly secular, I think the ultimate answer to that question will be no.
no subject