Wednesday, June 26, 2013
The Supreme Court gave a terrible ruling on voting rights. The narrow ruling on Prop 8 hopefully will establish marriage equality as law in California. But the ruling striking down Section 3 of DOMA already has the Pentagon acting to extend federal benefits to same sex couples. This will place same sex military couples in the peculiar situation of being married on military bases & installations in 30 states but not married off them. Many of these families must reside in off-base housing.
For those now complaining that marriage equality is "heteronormalization" (an interesting word), I would point out that it depends upon how you look at it. The middle class gays & lesbians who have largely financed & fought the marriage equality battle don't necessarily view their relationships as imitations of heterosexual relationships. Rather, they are comfortable with conventional lifestyles. Complain to them, not me. There many other types of lifestyles on the fringes of mainstream culture, not just queer ones.
48% of first live-together relationships now begin as cohabitation. Many couples never get married. In marriage equality states, that percentage probably holds to LBGT as well as straight couples. There seems to kind of "notm" to two person relationships that is intrinsic to our society, I don't see any underlying broad dissent to it.
Noisy protesters engaging in a "people's filibuster" effectively stopped - for the time being - an outrageously restrictive anti-abortion bill in Texas, preventing it from being signed into law by a midnight deadline. The bill would have closed every clinic in the state & prevented rural doctors residing more than 30 miles from the nearest hospital from performing the procedure.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
For those now complaining that marriage equality is "heteronormalization" (an interesting word), I would point out that it depends upon how you look at it. The middle class gays & lesbians who have largely financed & fought the marriage equality battle don't necessarily view their relationships as imitations of heterosexual relationships. Rather, they are comfortable with conventional lifestyles. Complain to them, not me. There many other types of lifestyles on the fringes of mainstream culture, not just queer ones.
48% of first live-together relationships now begin as cohabitation. Many couples never get married. In marriage equality states, that percentage probably holds to LBGT as well as straight couples. There seems to kind of "notm" to two person relationships that is intrinsic to our society, I don't see any underlying broad dissent to it.
Noisy protesters engaging in a "people's filibuster" effectively stopped - for the time being - an outrageously restrictive anti-abortion bill in Texas, preventing it from being signed into law by a midnight deadline. The bill would have closed every clinic in the state & prevented rural doctors residing more than 30 miles from the nearest hospital from performing the procedure.
