Four years ago, when the mayor of San Francisco made history by marrying gay folks down at City Hall, his fellow Democrat Dianne Feinstein voiced her displeasure in no uncertain terms. “Too much, too fast, too soon,” was the way she put it, and the ice water in her veins was almost audible. The senator’s 26 years in the national spotlight had been launched by a homophobic assassin, yet she still found a quarter of a century “too soon” for the full establishment of gay civil rights.
How much more time had she needed, for God’s sake? For years Feinstein had seen the full-blown horrors of AIDS and watched same-sex love in action -- sturdy, unwavering, unconditional love -- as LGBT families cared for the dying. She knew as well as anyone alive what we’d endured at the hands of a callous government and organized religious hatred. She had lived through Matthew Shepard’s crucifixion and scores of other antigay atrocities. When exactly, I wondered, would it be convenient for her to stand up for a constituency that had consistently returned her to office?
Maupin (left) and Turner wed in Vancouver in
February 2007. They plan to remarry in California.
The sad truth is that gay rights has always been the disposable card of liberal politics. The very fact of our existence is still “controversial” even to those who make a noise about being our friends. We’re still the fly in the ointment, the “divisive issue” that can lose an election. Just look at the weak-kneed response from the Clinton and Obama camps when the California supreme court made its landmark decision overthrowing the ban on same-sex marriage. Both candidates hid behind a campaign spokesperson and both reaffirmed their “separate but equal” policies of civil unions, thereby assuming a stance that would keep them in comfy solidarity with John McCain come November. The problem, of course, was that California court had just ruled that separate was NOT equal and never would be, so Clinton and Obama both ended up looking like -- there’s no other way to put this -- pussies. Faced with a major milestone in American civil rights, the Democratic contenders could offer neither congratulations nor condemnations. Like Dianne Feinstein four years earlier, they’d been completely upstaged by the decisive action of braver and wiser souls.
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