A drive-by post on Proposition 8

[blamebrampton]

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 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.