It’s satisfying, having access to a right that everybody else has access to, and to have that right unencumbered by any factor. These rights are inherent and do not come from the Constitution. Justice Kennedy recognized that. We can get married. Our marriages are recognized by the federal government, and nobody can limit those rights, including the US government. The people who try, like the various conservative churches and religions and the Republican Party, will, I suspect, lose adherents of their own rather than change our behavior. That’s already happening.
The recognition of these inherent rights is affecting the gay community in a variety of ways, depending on generation. A young friend, when the marriage cases were being debated before the Supreme Court, said he found it hard to believe that this debate was taking place. This should have been dealt with decades ago, he said, with a noticeable strain of impatience. Others, in the middle generations, see that these victories are the result of decades of work by thousands of activists. Now that we have arrived at the resolution we should have arrived at decades ago, we can move on. For myself, I don’t trust it. Our opponents fought too hard to prevent this from happening for us now to arrive on the scene and greet everyone present with good will. I think of all those in my generation who never had the option to marry—decent men and women who lived their whole lives without basic rights, without marriage and without the right to serve openly in the Armed Services, and without ever being able to be public about their feelings for their own gender. It is hard for me to turn around and to accept as my comrades the people who caused all this, people who were careless and malicious and ignorant of the lives of gay people. I remember the damage that has been done—people robbed of a portion of their lives—and I won’t forgive and can’t forget.
Two days ago, I read a brief piece on Huffington Post by a mother whose son came out to her in 2001, when he was twelve. This mother reacted badly,—she was a religious person—and the son grew up into an alcoholic and a drug addict and ultimately died of a drug overdose. The mother is pictured kissing the face of this son while he is in a coma, apparently before he died. I read this piece, and was almost incapacitated for days afterward, the thing was so painful.
I remember the people who didn’t get their rights during their lifetimes, who died before they were fully recognized. Now that we are getting our rights recognized, we have to remember the people who went before us. We can’t be the kind of people who forget.