By: Paul S. Marchand
Readers of this blog may recall that like sometime Chief Justice Warren Burger, I occasionally feel the need to fire off “Little Snappers,” brief rants or raves about things that have attracted my attention, yet which don’t merit extensive treatment. A number of things have pressed some buttons of late, and I feel the need to unburden myself of some Little Summer Snappers.
THE DESERT SUN’S TIRESOME VENDETTA AGAINST GREG PETTIS
Once again, our local Gannett newspaper puts us in a position of wondering whether New York Times v. Sullivan was correctly decided. Reporter Tamara Sone, who apparently wants to be consequential when she grows up, has been trying desperately to contrive some sort of coherent narrative of wrongdoing by Cathedral city councilmember Greg Pettis. Apparently, Sone believes that by stringing together a series of essentially unconnected allegations, she can create the impression that, taken cumulatively, Mr. Pettis’ activities must somehow constitute actionable wrongdoing. Unfortunately for her, the law --about which she knows nothing and cares less-- does not recognize the proposition that unrelated acts can ever constitute a cumulative crime.
Of course, what has become fairly clear is that this reporter has declared her allegiance to vindictive and embattled Cathedral city Mayor Kathleen Joan DeRosa (herself a subject of investigation by the California Fair Political Practices Commission for campaign wrongdoing), in DeRosa’s long-standing, ongoing effort to try to destroy Mr. Pettis, whom she views as not merely a political rival, but as a deadly enemy. Sone’s reliance upon such equivocal and problematic sources as DeRosa, or former councilmember Bud England (a notorious DeRosa ass-kisser), together with her solicitation of comments on the matter from third parties to whom she has offered essentially one-sided representations, has earned her the well-deserved contempt of a community that has grown tired of seeing the Desert Sun attempt, by any means necessary, to support DeRosa, carry her water, and play kingmaker in the local politics of Cathedral City. The clear message of such coverage in the Desert Sun is: don’t be an elected public official in Cathedral city and get crossways with DeRosa, or the Desert Sun will do its level best to destroy you.
Is it any surprise that long-suppressed rumors about DeRosa and her prior marriages have started to circulate? When, not if, evidence begins to surface of the more unsavory aspects of the incumbent mayor’s life and prior activities, will the Desert Sun spike the story to protect a woman who has apparently cultivated a very close personal relationship with the Desert Sun’s managing editor? As Rachel Maddow might say, “watch this space.”
QUEER WEDDINGS, REDUX
I didn’t think I would find myself reduced to stuttering, spluttering, sputtering, splenetic, fulminant rage by a comment I saw in a recent Desert Sun story headlined “Not All Gays Heading to Altar.” In the story, a lesbian interviewee in Chicago explained why she and her partner were disinclined to marry: “The institution of marriage has a really bad history in terms of feminist issues— women exchanged as property.... I think the idea that rights are determined on the basis of whether you’re married is a bad way to run a society.”
Whatever may have been prior history, times change; dispensations change; paradigms change. The idea that somehow the option of marriage is unimportant for all because two lesbian separatists in Chicago think it is unimportant for them seems curiously solipsistic, self-referential to a fault. Then I might be a commitment-phobic confirmed bachelor, not necessarily inclined to rush to the altar or down the courthouse to get hitched to another dude doesn’t mean that that marriage is “a bad way to run a society.”
When I was first fighting in the trenches for marriage equality, two decades ago, there were a number of so-called separatists who passionately opposed the idea that Ruth or Naomi, or Jonathan or David, should have access to the institution of marriage. Their opposition sounded not so much in appeals to traditional social dispensations, or even to Scripture, but in their belief that marriage was a “patriarchal,” “heterosexist,” institution with which queerfolk should have nothing to do. I viewed then, and view now, such attitudes as self-destructive and nonsensical. The separatists, who had very much hijacked much of the agenda of the queer civil rights movement at the time, strongly disapproved of my efforts secure marriage equality.
What, I asked the separatists when they excoriated me, would you substitute for marriage, a contract whose paradigms and outlines are broadly understood throughout society, among both its queer and straight members?
How, I asked the separatists, would you avoid the inevitable Plessy v. Ferguson problem in which “separate but equal,” ineluctably becomes “separate and unequal?”
Given, I asked the separatists, that society understands the rights and obligations that arise inter se between the parties to a marriage, and the rights and obligations of the couple with respect to outsiders, how would you create a “non-patriarchal,” “non-heterosexist” institution for joining two persons that society can understand?
The response from the separatists? Crickets.
Yet, a generation later, we still see separatists wanting to impose their theories and images of perfection upon pragmatic practice. Marriage may not be for everybody, but it is certainly for an awful lot of people, and for separatists to take the line that because marriage is not for them it shouldn’t be for anybody, is just self-sabotaging nonsense.
SOMETHING OLD, SOMETHING NEW, SOMETHING BORROWED, SOMETHING BLUE
Grouchy separatists notwithstanding, there was something truly uplifting about watching the joy of most of the queer nation as marriage equality became a reality in California after a four-plus-year hiatus inflicted upon us by religious sectarians seeking to recast California in their own hateful and intolerant image.
On my Facebook newsfeed and in my e-mail inboxes, news of old friends celebrating weddings long denied to them came in almost daily. Even old friends I didn’t expect to be in the marriage market have been tying the knot, and I can’t help but smile at the almost giddy happiness I detect in them. Even a curmudgeon like me can’t entirely escape a sense that a good part of our community is feeling some “crazy stupid love” right about now.
As I suggested a while back, the dynamics of the queer nation are changing, and nothing in our queer lives will ever be quite the same again. For the commitment-phobic or the confirmed bachelors among us, the existence of the marriage option will no doubt impose upon some of us the challenge of learning how to say “no” as gracefully as possible. Nonetheless, not every dude who sacks out with another dude will necessarily expect to be made a so-called honest man. (And pace, flame warriors, I’m not implying that queerfolk are unethical who don’t marry their bed partners right off, so chill.)
At least for now, many of us queerfolk can still venture to rejoice that DOMA is dead and marriage is very much alive in the Golden State. As we prepare to wed, or as we prepare to attend the weddings of friends, rummaging through hope chests for “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue,” we should remember how far we’ve come, how fast.
- Just a generation ago, we were keeping vigil for the uncounted thousands we had lost to an illness that was once a guaranteed death sentence, but which has now been roped and hogtied to the point of being a manageable, long-term, chronic condition.
- Just a generation ago, our government was declaring that the mark of our queer differencing categorically unfitted us for military service, yet today queer Americans serve openly and proudly in our armed forces.
- Just a decade ago, queer couples aspired to nothing more than “civil unions,” a kind of second-class, Plessy v. Ferguson “marriage lite.”
Today, as our couples stand before altars or in courtrooms or in other wedding venues to plight to one another their troth, one would have to be amazingly hardhearted not to let the tears come; we have fought so very hard, for so very long, for so very much, and we are still so much the target of so much hate, that when love conquers, the waterworks necessarily begin.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and practices in Cathedral City. He has been in the trenches fighting for marriage equality for two decades, and rejoices in this new day for California couples. The views expressed herein are his own, and are not intended as legal advice.
