A flurry of legal developments happened yesterday, so now there are 32 states where people like us can marry: hit the links to read up on the mind-boggling good news.
And although this is not my idea at all of a proper do, I still had to get my hanky out - Kevin Patterson and David Larance have the first gay wedding in Arizona:
And here's a great piece on Karen and Nelda, the lesbian couple you see in the video above, who have been waiting since the freakin' Eisenhower Administration for the right to marry!
Finally, a sweet pic from Idaho taken earlier this week:
In the last two days, the rolling tide of marriage equality has washed over four more states: Nevada, West Virginia, Idaho, and North Carolina. Just amazing. Here's a sweet clip of the first two men married late yesterday in Raleigh, North Carolina, both of them sheriff's deputies:
Oh my. I have lived to see this day. Your Head Trucker remembers a time when the officers of the law, instead of kissing your sweet lips, would have been kicking your gay ass all over town.
At the moment there are 29 states plus DC with marriage equality - and counting That covers about three-fifths of the U. S. population. Here is another ugly but up-to-date map, this time from Freedom to Marry:
Yet another win for marriage equality, as the Idaho State Journalreports:
[U.S. District Judge Candy] Dale struck down Idaho's same-sex marriage ban in response to a lawsuit from four Idaho couples. Dale said Idaho's law unconstitutionally denies gay and lesbian couples their fundamental right to marry and wrongly stigmatizes their families. She said the state must start issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples Friday morning.
In her ruling, Judge Dale wrote:
This case asks a basic and enduring question about the essence of American government: Whether the will of the majority, based as it often is on sincere beliefs and democratic consensus, may trump the rights of a minority. . . .
[T]he dispositive principle in this case is that "fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections." The Supreme Court has endorsed this principle again and again. As Justice Robert Jackson so eloquently put it [in 1949]:
The framers of the Constitution knew, and we should not forget today, that there is no more effective practical guaranty against arbitrary and unreasonable government than to require that the principles of law which officials would impose upon a minority must be imposed generally. Conversely, nothing opens the door to arbitrary action so effectively as to allow those officials to pick and choose only a few to whom they will apply legislation and thus to escape the political retribution that might be visited upon them if larger numbers were affected. Courts can take no better measure to assure that laws will be just than to require that laws be equal in operation.
This principle resonates today, as 10 federal courts across the country have in recent months reached similar conclusions on the very issues present in this case. Considering many of the same arguments and much of the same law, each of these courts concluded that state laws prohibiting or refusing to recognize same-sex marriage fail to rationally advance legitimate state interests. This judicial consensus was forged from each court’s independent analysis of Supreme Court cases extending from Loving through Romer, Lawrence, and Windsor. The logic of these precedents virtually compels the conclusion that same-sex and opposite-sex couples deserve equal dignity when they seek the benefits and responsibilities of civil marriage. Because Idaho’s Marriage Laws do not withstand any applicable form of constitutional scrutiny, the Court finds they violate the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
This morning, Judge Dale denied Governor Butch Otter's request for a stay; the state will now ask the U.S. Ninth Circuit for a stay.
BTW - Governor Butch Otter?? That's rich.
Wikipedia's marriage map is pretty damn ugly and way confusing, but it reflects accurately the crazy-quilt nature of state laws on marriage equality at present:
Marriage equality states are in dark blue. Click here for a legend and explanatory footnotes.
Apropos of nothing in particular, it's just something I happened to run across on YouTube. Never heard of this incident before; I didn't know there was any meltdown in this country before Three Mile Island. Thought I'd share it with you guys, it's kind of a gripping story and interesting for the history and technology of the time. More details available on Wikipedia.
Your Head Trucker believes it to be very important that we remember the past and deeply consider where we were just a few years ago, only half a lifetime. People who don't remember the past are liable to be sucked under the wheels of the ever-turning hate machine that is always, always in the midst of the human race - and always in the human heart - let's not let that happen.
It was a time when a federal agency could send a memo like this to an employee - just before firing him, with no recourse, no appeal:
We have received a report concerning you. It has been reported that you had permitted a man to perform a homosexual act (fellatio) on you. Also, that you related that you find members of the male sex attractive; that you have been in bed with men; and that you have enjoyed embracing them. Is this report true?
New film:
And do take time to listen to the story of our grand old man, Frank Kameny, the first who ever took the government to court over gay rights, and the guy who invented the phrase "Gay is Good" (we should bring that back and use it more often):
You have to remember it was a very different period; kids and adults alike had it drilled into their heads that the homos were an active, terrifying danger to society, as this warning film from 1961 shows:
And so gays and lesbians were spied on, sent to reform school, expelled from college, fired from their jobs, beaten, arrested, imprisoned, confined in mental wards, lobotomized, and hounded to death for being evil queers: go read up on the Boise witch hunt in Idaho or the Johns Committee in Florida. To name but two.
All our gains have been very hard-won. There are many among us who remember those days; and many an unknown soul, isolated and afraid, who did not survive the hatred and persecution. Don't forget, is all I'm saying.
Never forget.
More striking in his correspondence, however, is an almost magisterial serenity. He exhibits an unshakable and unmistakably American confidence that all the great and mighty, no matter their number or power, must bow to one weak man who has the Founders' promise on his side. "We are honorable people who deal with others honorably and in good faith," he insisted to the Un-American Activities Committee. "We expect to be dealt with in the same fashion -- especially by our governmental officials." There you hear the pipsqueak, indomitable voice of equality.
For Kameny's papers to join Thurgood Marshall's and Daniel Patrick Moynihan's, and for his signs to join Jefferson's writing desk and Lincoln's inkwell, seems fitting. All of those men understood that the words of 1776 set in motion a moral engine unlike any the world had ever seen; and all understood that the logic of equality could be delayed but not denied. Kameny, like them, believed that the Declaration of Independence means exactly what it says, and like them he made its promise his purpose.
My partner, Michael, and I are among the millions who owe some large measure of our happiness to Kameny's pursuits. This Thanksgiving found me grateful that one pariah fought back, never imagining he could fail; even more grateful to live in a country with a conscience; most grateful of all to know that there are generations of Franklin Kamenys yet to be born.
From The Advocate via Joe.My.God: the 1967 CBS Reports: The Homosexuals.
Homo = pervert = sick = dirty = disgusting = miserable = doomed: this was the world I grew up in and remember so vividly. The attitudes and prejudice and total condemnation that drove a lot of guys to suicide, and deeply wounded those of us who survived - wounds that still hurt and still deeply affect our lives all these years later.
I didn't see this show when it was first broadcast, and that's probably a good thing, but I do have a memory from just a couple of years later that I want to share with you.
When my father died unexpectedly in my junior year of high school, an older lady I'd never met before, some friend of the family, started a conversation with me at the viewing. She pulled a photograph out of her purse and said, "This is my grandson, we just buried him a few months ago. He killed himself with a shotgun in his car one night. Look at his picture: he was such a handsome young man, smart, athletic, popular. I just can't understand why he would do a thing like that. Can you?" I suppose because I was nearly the same age as her grandson, she perhaps hoped I would have some younger-generation insight into this unfathomable mystery that obviously grieved her deeply.
I looked at the photo, his senior portrait: yes, a smiling, goodlooking guy with wavy blondish hair, neatly dressed in sport jacket and tie, the kind of guy who might have been elected class president or won a scholarship to an Ivy League school. The kind of guy who would have been popular in school, who could have had lots of friends, and plenty of girls lined up to date him. I had to tell her no, I couldn't understand it, either.
But years later, I remembered: and it flashed on me. What if he was gay? And then it all made sense: the fatal sense of guilt, the inward shame, the disgust with one's self, the need to hide and pretend, the unanswered prayers, the hopelessness. The knowing that you would never be what everyone thought, what everyone expected you to be. The despair. The unremitting pain. The one way out.
There was no hope for small-town guys back then. Do watch this and learn just what the world was like for us gays not so long ago, just in my lifetime; and notice that some straight people's minds have not moved one inch forward in the forty-three years since then.
Some quotes from Mike Wallace:
“The average homosexual, if there be such, isn’t interested in or capable of a lasting relationship like that of a heterosexual marriage. His life, his love life, consists of series of chance encounters in the clubs and bars he inhabits, and on the streets.”
“Homosexuality is, in fact, a mental illness.”
“The church has a great deal of sympathy for those who are handicapped in this way.”
“[Being a homosexual] automatically rules out that [the man in question] will remain happy.”
The men (no mention of lesbians is ever made) who aren’t on camera as representatives of fledgling gay rights groups at the time, like the Mattachine Society, are interviewed in shadow or behind plants, and say things like, “I know I’m sick inside . . . immature.” And then comes the segment on a 1955 homosexual witch hunt in Boise, Idaho, one that apparently turned the whole town upside down with fear and paranoia, with a close-up of an op-ed piece in the Boise newspaper titled “Crush the Monster.”
On a related note: here's a trailer for the 2006 documentary The Fall of '55, about the Boise witch hunt:
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is discord, harmony; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. Grant that I may seek not so much to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.
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We cannot all do great things, but we can do small things with great love.
and welcome to the Blue Truck, a blog for mature gay men with news and views on gay rights, history, art, humor, and whatever comes to mind. Plus a few hot men. The truck's all washed and gassed up, so hop in buddy, let's go.
CAUTION: For mature gay men only beyond this point. Some posts and links may not be suitable for children or the unco guid. You have been warned.
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My Story
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Churches say that the expression of love in a heterosexual monogamous relationship includes the physical, the touching, embracing, kissing, the genital act - the totality of our love makes each of us grow to become increasingly godlike and compassionate. If this is so for the heterosexual, what earthly reason have we to say that it is not the case with the homosexual?
It is a perversion if you say to me that a person chooses to be homosexual. You must be crazy to choose a way of life that exposes you to a kind of hatred. It's like saying you choose to be black in a race-infected society.
If God, as they say, is homophobic, I wouldn't worship that God.
