THE HUMAN RIGHTS CAMPAIGN (HRC), America’s largest gay-rights group, recently announced it will spend at least a half million dollars to defeat the California Marriage Protection Act. That constitutional amendment, which will take nothing away from Golden State same-sex couples but the word “marriage,” poses no substantive threat to gays and lesbians. Even if HRC wants Californians to vote no on the initiative, there are far more useful ways to help gays and lesbians with $500,000 than struggling to retain an unpopular court victory that was only semantic and symbolic.
I propose that half the sum be spent on achieving rights for same-sex couples who live in states that are much more hostile to gays and lesbians than California. Eighteen states representing a third of the nation’s population reacted to the gay community’s rush toward marriage lawsuits by passing constitutional amendments barring both same-sex marriage and any other kind of recognition similar to marriage for gay and lesbian couples.
So while HRC is pushing for gays in San Francisco to be able to use their favorite term for their relationships, gay and lesbian couples in Dallas and Ann Arbor and Norfolk have no way to make sure hospitals let them visit each other when one is sick, and have to hope a judge won’t prevent them from inheriting each other’s property — and custody of their children — should one of them die.
Constrained by one such constitutional amendment, advocates for fairness in the most unlikely of places — Salt Lake City — have come up with a creative solution that is both constitutional and alleviates the distress of non-married couples. In that city, people who share a “mutual commitment” — whether their relationship is conjugal or not — have a set of rights including insurance and workplace benefits. The gay movement should use the $250,000 saved by pulling out of the California battle to try to achieve as many rights as possible for same-sex couples in states like Georgia, Ohio, and Wisconsin.
The other quarter-million dollars should be spent in California, but to help gays and lesbians facing much more pressing needs than the ego boost of having the government tell them they’re married instead of in a domestic partnership.
Communities like Catholics and African Americans raise money from rich Catholics and blacks to help mentor, financially assist, and otherwise aid the poorest members of those communities. But those of us in the gay and lesbian movement have done a lousy job of paying attention to people who share our identity but do not have the resources to hobnob with rich tuxedoed lesbians and gay men at fancy dinners.
The most obvious proof is the rapid diminishment of AIDS as a priority for gay organizations once the main victims of the disease were no longer the wealthy gay white men who funded the movement. AIDS is still a crisis among gay and bisexual men, especially African Americans, but because most of the infections are among people who are black or poor or both, the gay movement has largely moved on to issues it considers more “relevant.” For example, HRC’s Web site mentions marriage more than five times as often as AIDS.
Some of the most vulnerable members of the gay community are the gay and bisexual men and transgender women who are behind bars. It has been nearly a decade since any sizable gay organization has worked to help the members of our community who are in prison.
They face repeated rapes, humiliation, and beatings. Transgender women are overrepresented in prison, and many have special needs that are simply not addressed by the system. Surely, just $100,000 from the HRC California marriage gift could go a long way toward helping relieve the horrors faced by incarcerated gays living in places like Folsom and San Quentin.
The rest of the money could go to help gays and lesbians who suffer from addictions, who are immigrants, who have mental illnesses, who have contracted sexually transmitted diseases from having gay sex, and who are homeless.
None of those people have received anything close to the attention they deserve from gays and lesbians with comfortable lives, who appear to prefer to focus on the cause du jour, and right now that’s the word “marriage.”
DAVID BENKOF is a columnist for several gay newspapers around the country. He blogs at GaysDefendMarriage.com and
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on June 10, 2008. Read the original PDF.