Letters
Full Article:
Kent begins by acknowledging: "While the defeat in Arizona was a victory, it does not significantly advance the rights or legal protections for same sex couples…" He goes on to describe the choices made by the movement organizers with the most clout. After nine polls, they found that "images...of same-sex couples, were generally abhorrent to voters." This information led to an anti-amendment campaign focused on elderly, straight domestic partners. Apparently, much of the campaign depended on television advertising depicting elderly couples who would be negatively affected by the amendment.
In Kentucky, we were fortunate in our poverty. We didn't have money to conduct nine polls nor could we afford television advertising. The "other side" covered billboards and the airwaves. We had no choice but to use grassroots organizing. And I believe that is where our victory was won.
Thousands of people across Kentucky walked door to door to ask their neighbors to vote no on the anti-gay marriage amendment. I walked in my home town of Louisville with my then six-year-old son. Meeting people face to face on their porches and asking them not to use our state constitution to discriminate against my family was powerful. Although I made a financial donation to the campaign, my real contribution, and that of many thousands of Kentuckians, was facing my community and asking them to consider their decision.
The victory that we did win in Kentucky, came from each time someone opened the door and held a conversation with an activist for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights. Imagine: They stood up from their TVs, where the right wing maligned us, opened the door, and didn't scream or hide the children. In my experience, people were willing to listen and even discuss.
The door-to-door walks were held almost daily by the end of the campaign. One walk I remember in particular was out in the country and required traipsing down long driveways to reach each front door. At the end of that afternoon I was reminded of a comment made by a woman in Birmingham, Alabama during the bus boycott: "My feets is tired, but my soul is rested."
Anti-gay marriage amendments have afforded the opportunity to many communities in "losing" states to build their LGBT rights movements. We may not have won domestic partnership in Kentucky, but we built community alliances, and I believe these may be just as valuable. By asking members of the labor, religious, and African American communities in Kentucky to sign on in support of the campaign, we ensured that the issue was discussed and debated. I am sure that the leadership of the campaign believed that the alliances with a wide variety of communities would help us win. But I also think that they considered building those alliances as important as winning. I do.
Ann Walsh, Louisville, KY
Thanks, Peacework, for devoting an entire issue (April 2007) to marriage equality with such political and personal depth. I'd like to add my $.02 on the assumptions we make about sex. We need to look deeper into what we mean by sex when we say "same-sex marriage." We assume that we have shared definitions of "man" and "woman," but the reality of male and female is not that straightforward.
Most people do not know that 1 in 2000 people are born with bodies that do not meet the biological definition of male or female. Sometimes we use chromosomes to determine a person's sex, but 1 in 1666 people do not have XY (male) or XX (female) sex chromosomes. Some people are born with partially developed sex anatomy, combinations of male and female tissue, mixed chromosomes, genitals that are considered too big or too small to be male or female, or with sex anatomy that is not considered either. In other words, there are hundreds of thousands of people in the US, and millions worldwide, who do not meet the criteria of "a man" or "a woman" based on current biological definitions. These people are assigned one gender or the other at birth (as we all are), and in adulthood many go on to enter "heterosexual" marriages. A woman with a Y chromosome is just that -- a woman with a Y chromosome. A man with XYY chromosomes is a man with XYY chromosomes. Or are they?
Well of course they are, but once we use sex to determine what a person can or cannot do, we must also look at how we determine sex.
How does anyone propose to limit marriage to "one man and one woman"? Could XX people only be permitted to marry XY people? What would we do with all the XO, XXYY, XYY, XXY, etc. people whose chromosomes do not comply? Limiting civil rights based on sex is not only discrimination, but could create a groundswell of social uncertainty.
There is no concrete way to determine physical sex that is true for everyone so we have to understand the truth about sex -- and the truth is that sex is too variant to determine who we are, let alone what we feel. So the next time someone says marriage should be a bond between a man and a woman, ask them to define "a man and a woman," and then tell them what you know.
Esther Morris Leidolf, MRKH Organization, Jamaica Plain, MA
For more information, visit www.mrkh.org, or www.intersexualite.org
