Dishonored in Death

From the Jackson, Mississippi, Clarion-Ledger:

Picayune Funeral Home, in Picayune, is accused of refusing to cremate the remains of Robert "Bob" Huskey after learning he was married to a man at the time of his death, according to attorney Beth Littrell with Lambda Legal, a New York-based organization working for the civil rights of lesbians, gay men, and people with HIV/AIDS.

"After 52 years together and after having made pre-arrangements to ensure what was already a sad and tragic day would be as easy as possible, they were told that the funeral home was unwilling to honor their agreement and, as a result, their already sad day become immeasurably worse," Littrell said.

The little town of Picayune (pronounced picky-OON) is about 50 miles northeast of New Orleans.

Marriage Wins in Arkansas and Mississippi

Marriage equality came a giant step closer to reality yesterday in two Deep South states, as Freedom to Marry reported overnight. Just amazing to this native Southerner.

1. Arkansas:

Today, November 25, U.S. District Court Judge Karen Baker ruled in favor of the freedom to marry in Arkansas, declaring the state's Amendment 83, which limits the freedom to marry to different-sex couples, is unconstitutional. The ruling is staying pending a presumptive appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit.

The ruling is the second landmark decision in favor of marriage in Arkansas in less than 6 months, following a May 2014 ruling in state court, which is now currently being considered by the Arkansas Supreme Court. In May, following the state ruling, more than 500 same-sex couples from across the state received marriage licenses over the course of the week before the ruling was put on hold pending the appeal to the AR Supreme Court.

The case today was in Jernigan v. Crane, filed in July 2013 by Little Rock-based attorney Jack Wagoner of Wagoner Law Firm. The case before the Arkansas Supreme Court is Wright v. Smith.

Text of the ruling here.

2.  Mississippi:

The latest in a landmark string of court victories for the freedom to marry came today, November 25, from Mississippi, where a federal judge has ruled the state's constitutional amendment denying the freedom to marry to same-sex couples unconstitutional. The ruling is stayed for 14 days pending appeal.

U.S. District Court Judge Carlton W. Reeves ruled today in Campaign for Southern Equality v. Bryant, a federal legal case challenging Missisippi's anti-marriage amendment. The judge struck down the marriage ban, the 56th court ruling since June 2013 in favor of the freedom to marry. Just four courts - most notably, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit - upheld marriage discrimination. Plaintiffs from the 6th Circuit cases, out of Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee, are now seeking review from that out-of-step ruling from the United States Supreme Court. The plaintiffs in a case out of Louisiana, where a federal judge upheld marriage discirmination in September, are also seeking Supreme Court review.

The case in Mississippi was brought on behalf of two same-sex couples and the Campaign for Southern Equality by private counsel, including Roberta Kaplan of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP and Mississippi attorney Robert McDuff of McDuff & Byrd, based in Jackson. In 2013, Kaplan led Windsor v. United States, the case that brought down the core of the so-called Defense of Marriage Act at the U.S. Supreme Court in June 2013.

Text of the ruling here.

All God's Children

First in a new series of videos produced by the Human Rights Campaign to bolster support for LGBT Mississipians:



Fellas, when we get outspoken, upscale, "Bible-believing" white women like that on our side, you can believe the battle's all but over - in the matriarchal South, anyway.

Mississippi Love Story

Promo for "a short documentary that takes a poignant glimpse into the lives, relationships and politics of life-partners Eddie Outlaw and Justin McPherson, at a time when citizens in Mississippi and across the nation were watching and waiting for the U.S. Supreme Court decision in the Defense of Marriage Act case. The time to leave Mississippi has passed for Eddie and Justin. They are committed to staying and making Jackson a thriving place for the gay community to live and, hopefully, in which to marry one day." - from the Vimeo description page.




Via Towleroad.

Taking the Struggle to Mississippi

A world away from the United Kingdom, which passed a same-sex marriage bill this week, two gay couples were refused marriage licenses in Jackson, Mississippi this week:



Which was only to be expected. But my God - making a protest for gay marriage in Jackson like this? You fellas from the big blue-state wonderland have no idea how fucking brave these couples are.

The We Do campaign is making such demonstrations all across the Magnolia State this month:

Gay Wedding Sparks Outrage in Mississippi

Much to your Head Trucker's astonishment and delight, the hard rock of homophobia is nowadays slowly being chipped away, even in the most surprising places - like small towns in the Deep South.

Two gals got hitched over in Laurel, Mississippi, a couple of weeks ago, complete with bridal gown, wedding cake, and an exchange of vows in front of family and friends. Of course, this kind of commitment ceremony - completely unrecognized by state law - has happened thousands of times all across the nation and the South in the last forty years, and maybe you've even attended some of them. But this time something was different: the local paper printed the story on the front page, along with a big picture of the happy couple, and a bolded quote that "love is love, it knows no gender."

Hoo-wee, did that stir up a wasp's nest of angry calls to the editor of the Laurel Leader-Call, who responded this week with an editorial justifying the paper's decision to run the story. Excerpt:

We knew going in that the gay wedding story was going to ruffle some feathers. We were well aware that the majority of people in Jones County are not in favor of gay marriage. However, any decent newspaper with a backbone can not base decisions on whether to cover a story based on whether the story will make people angry.

The job of a community newspaper is not pretending something didn't take place or ignoring it because it will upset people. No, our job is to inform readers what is going on in our town and let them make their own judgements. That is exactly what we did with the wedding story. Our reporter heard about the wedding, attended it, interviewed some of the participants and wrote a news story. If there had been protestors at the wedding, we would have covered that the exact same way . . . but there weren't any. We never said it was a good thing or a bad thing, we simply did our job by telling people what took place. . . .

We have stories about child molesters, murders and all kinds of vicious, barbaric acts of evil committed by heinous criminals on our front page and yet we never receive a call from anyone saying "I don't need my children reading this." Never. Ever. However, a story about two women exchanging marriage vows and we get swamped with people worried about their children.

Read the full editorial here.

Kudos to the courageous editor. And I hope the women and their daughter stay safe.

PS - In your Head Trucker's view, the editor's only mistake was running the story under a huge, all-caps headline. It's not like commitment ceremonies have never happened in Mississippi before (and probably even in Laurel).

James Meredith: Still at War, 50 Years On

James Meredith arrives on the Ole Miss campus, guarded by U. S. Marshalls

For us queer people, especially those like your Head Trucker who have lived well along into the afternoon of life, the progress of our struggle for equal rights and the equal protection of the laws often seems to be moving at a snail's pace. And yet we can take heart to some degree that such progress is always slow to come, for any group asserting its claim to the fullness of citizenship. The reason being, people in every age and clime are all too often fearful of losing their grip on the comfortable division of society into Us and Them.

This and other reflections may come to your mind too when you watch this excerpt from a BBC interview with James Meredith, who on October 1, 1962, became the first black person to register at the University of Mississippi, an event that was a major milestone in the Civil Rights Movement.



This excerpt from Episode 2 of the documentary Eyes on the Prize fills in the background of the Ole Miss riots, in which two people were killed, more than 300 injured, and 35 federal marshalls shot by snipers on campus.



Those of you who didn't grow up in the South should note that this kind of conflict and violence was local and infrequent - not an everyday thing, as you might think. Your Head Trucker remembers the days of segregation vividly from his childhood, the separate restrooms and drinking fountains and all the rest.

Yet, despite living, you might say, the first 20 years of my life in a small city of nearly a quarter-million population, there was never once any such demonstration or violent conflict as you see in documentaries of the period. All through the sixties, life went on as calmly and quietly as you could want - sometimes, to a kid, rather boringly so. (I was alternately excited and a bit ashamed of myself when one afternoon the oldest high school building in town burned down - of course, I had to go watch the flames and firefighters in person. What fun, in a place where everything was usually very routine and predictable.)

The big marches and demonstrations and riots and bombings, etc., that you see pictures of history books and films all happened far away. The grown-ups talked about those things sometimes, and of course they all deplored what Dr. King and other civil rights leaders were trying to achieve - the casual evil of indifference and ignorance - but the dramatic conflicts and violence were not an everyday sight for the vast majority of people living in the South at the time; it was something you read about in the paper, or saw on the evening news. The ironclad rules and customs of segregation kept everyone, white and black, in their places until, bit by bit, the laws changed, the schools integrated, and despite all the muttering and grumbling by whites, before you knew it, the seventies were here, and the revolution was over and done with, fairly painlessly in most places.

The old-time segregationist leaders sort of faded away, and the few who remained reinvinted themselves politically and began actively courting the black vote. All of this is not to say that there was no suffering and struggle on the part of black people - far from it. I'm just making the point that for most people the mainsprings of destiny lie somewhere beyond the confines of ordinary day-to-day life - the dramatic events, the turning points of history, tend to happen in a few specific points of space and time, not everywhere and at all times. And thank God for the courage of those who do take a stand when and where they can - otherwise, change and progress would never take place.

Why Everybody Says "Thank God for Mississippi"

Everybody in neighboring states, that is; Mississippi makes them look good by comparison.  Fifty years ago, as your Head Trucker well recalls, and perhaps even forty years ago, this would not have been news at all in most parts of the South:  just bidness as usual.

Yet though times have changed drastically for racial equality across the length and breadth of Dixie, there are even yet some pockets of resistance, as in Crystal Springs, a small town near Jackson, the capital of Mississippi.



If they feel that way about the blacks, just imagine how they feel about the queers.