AS agrees with a reader who writes:
Twenty (even ten) years ago, same-sex marriage was pretty much unheard of, and civil unions were a radical idea.You know, you'd think that the fight for equality started with the publication of Virtually Normal. It didn't. The 'marriage debate' (as well as applicants for marriage licenses) was around long before it was assigned - yes, assigned - to AS to write about.
But where the movement actually got it legs was when activists pushed for marriage ‹ they succeeded in putting the big goal on the table and in shifting the conversation leftwards so that civil unions, which were previously pretty out there, were suddenly the moderate position.Holy shit. Am I just in a bad mood or is this just wishful revisionism? Domestic partnership was pushed with some success in localities before the Hawaii marriage push. (skip forward to page ten, for NYC history).
Strategically, the blowback from Hawaii should have been an indicator that another strategy was preferred. Of course, that's easy to say and hard to do...but still, let's not get crazed that ending up behind a mountain of Constitutional Amendments was somehow ... "educational" or without question, smart.
Has Virtually Normal been persuasive? I'm unconvinced it has, in the way that the great social consciousness-raising books of the liberation period had impact, and even more that social changes are related to it directly. That doesn't mean such polemic isn't worth trying, but let's not get carried away...
AS IS A "HOSTAGE"
We haven't done enough work on transgender rights yet. We should do more, I think. But holding everyone else hostage in the meantime makes no sense to me."Hostages"? Didn't want to go for "human shields", eh, because it was already taken?
Some people will just never 'get it' (as if the selection of "tranny" in AS's lead wasn't clue enough).
As someone was pointing out, this Bill will never become law under Bush, so "incrementalism" is what doesn't make any sense.
