Leixlip I laughed…I cried…I made a puzzled face and clicked over to FindLaw to download the text of this week’s Supreme Court decisions in the U. S. And the conclusion I came to was that I feel…some kind of way about the court deciding we no longer need perhaps the most critical piece of civil rights legislation of the twentieth century, then giving the nod to my partner and I to marry (sort of…if our state ever agrees, which seems to be an entirely forgotten point in the whole frenzy of happy dancing).
All in all, I summed up the main points of my feelings over at BlogHer:
…how am I to feel when the Supreme Court decides today that my partner and I could potentially be legally married, but my daughters—both Black—had their future voting rights threatened by the striking down of a key aspect of the 1965 Voting Rights Act yesterday?
I am cynical enough to think that we won the right to (sort of) marry because queers are imagined as white and middle, or upper-class, like Ellen Degeneres or Anderson Cooper. Those people are comfortably familiar enough to Supreme Court-types to “deserve” civil rights, whereas poor southern Black grandmothers without driver’s licenses to show at the polls aren’t as obviously deserving of a vote.
Read more here.
[FEATURED PHOTO: BENSPARK]
Thanks for calling attention to the very mixed bag of decisions handed down this week. I was gut-wrenched by the voters’ rights decision. As for the semi-celebration of marriage equality for some, know that at the gathering at San Francisco City Hall today, every single speaker acknowledged that, despite the restoration of marriage equality in CA, we are not done fighting until everyone can get married, and every time someone said it, the crowd errupted in applause. Today we celebrate; tomorrow we get beck to work.
Nicely put.
We are definitely living in a two step forward, one step back kind of reality. It’s difficult to celebrate the victories when there are so many outrageous injustices. Overriding Congress’s decision was, as Ruth Bader Ginsburg said, a disturbing lapse in reasoning.
You are so very not alone.