SCOTUS & Civil Rights

 There’s a tectonic shift happening in the U.S. – and it centers on civil rights. First, on June 25, the U.S. supreme court struck down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act. This provision of the 1965 landmark civil rights law designates which parts of the country must have changes to their voting laws cleared by the federal government or in federal court. This is huge. It means that states can now redistrict to their hearts’ delight so that minorities – who generally vote democratic – are disenfranchised.

 The ruling was 5-4, with justices Scalia, Alito,  Kennedy, Thomas and Roberts citing how “things have changed dramatically in the south” in the nearly 50 years since the act was enacted. In other words: discrimination? What’s that? We don’t have any discrimination in this country.  Right. That’s why some of the black districts in Florida had to wait 6-7 hours to vote in the 2012 election.

 Yet, the very next day, this same supreme court, these same justices, struck down California’s proposition 8, which banned gay marriage.  This is also huge, in a more positive way. About a third of the states in the U.S. approve of gay marriage – which leaves a huge chunk that don’t.

 This approval, though,  has real, tangible consequences. It means that if you’re a legally gay married couple in a state that recognizes gay marriage, you can file joint tax returns, can collect social security benefits when your spouse dies, that you don’t have to pay taxes on your deceased spouse’s estate. It means you can make end of life decisions for your spouse – in other words, it encompasses all the rights that straight married couples have.

Surprisingly, the military has come out in full support of this strike down to prop 8. If your gay spouse is deployed and killed in action, the military couldn’t even notify you as next to kin about your spouse’s death under the former ruling. Now they can. Now the surviving spouse can collect federal benefits.

There were two gay couples who challenged prop 8 – a female couple and a male couple. Kris Perry and Sandy Stier  have children they are raising together and fought the ban primarily because of their kids. They were married on Friday, June 28, by California Attorney General Kamala Harris after the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals did away with the 25-day holding period and ordered state officials to stop enforcing Proposition 8.

 The male couple, Paul Katami and Jeff Zarrillo, who have been together for 12 years, were married by the mayor of Los Angeles and the marriage was broadcast live on the Rachel Maddow Show. Both of these marriages were moving, monumental.

There are people who  rail against these unions, who will tell you that the bible forbids such unions, that it’s sodomy, that it will unravel the fabric of traditional marriage, that children should not be raised by gay couples. To these people, I say: Love is love. It doesn’t care about the color of your skin, your cultural background, or your sexual orientation.

My first editor, Chris Cox, was gay. He loved his partner Bill, the curator of a Manhattan museum, without restraint, without boundaries. When Bill was diagnosed with AIDS, Chris’s world fell apart.  He cared for Bill on his own as long as he could. But when Bill began to lose his sight, his parents flew him home to Minnesota to care for him. And every weekend, they flew Chris out to Minnesota to spend time with Bill.

Not long after Bill’s diagnosis, Chris was diagnosed with AIDS. He was estranged from his family and his primary caretaking came from  a co-worker, editor  Cheryl Woodruff, and his old friend Susan Sarandon, who paid for a private nurse to tend to Chris. He called me on the day of Bill’s diagnosis and on the day he was diagnosed. He was in tears. AIDS was relatively new then, and I, a straight woman, didn’t really understand much of anything about the disease except that then, in the early 1990s, a diagnosis usually spelled a death sentence.

On the day Chris passed away, my agent, a gay woman who had formed a deep bond with Chris, called to tell me the news. Not long afterward, a day or two, Cheryl called and told me Chris had asked for me to speak at his memorial service. So Rob, Megan and I flew to New York for the service. Megan was barely a year old.

Susan Sarandon gave the opening talk, a moving tribute to her long friendship with Chris. I was next and after Sarandon’s talk, hoped that I would at least be able to utter a single word.

I thought of all this when the supreme court struck down prop 8. How can we, a country that calls itself the most democratic on the planet, have made it illegal in the 50s for black and whites to marry? Or to make it illegal in the 21^st century for gays to marry? We are supposedly a nation where diversity is welcome – and yet, when the diverse appear, we attack them, deny them rights, and it has to go all the way to the supreme court to be sorted out.

And SCOTUS  didn’t go as far as they should have. They should have made it federal law; gay marriage should be recognized throughout all 50 states.  But the ruling is a step in the right direction, and would have made a difference for Chris and Bill because they were residents of New York, one of the handful of states that recognize gay marriage.

I like to think that Chris, this energetic and brilliant man who loved life, to whom I am forever indebted for giving me my first break, is in the afterlife cheering, his fist raised, pumping at the air. Yes.Yes.