It’s time for the Senate to weigh in on my marriage.
Why a Black lesbian married couple with kids left Texas
My taking this stand might strike some as self-interested. After all, I am an out gay man married to a man of another race. So, of course, there’s self-interest; I want my union respected just as you do yours. But this is also about the dangerous atmosphere around this debate — and the impact that it is having on children.
Last month, Stacey Stevenson, chief executive of the LGBTQ+ advocacy organization Family Equality, told me that she and her wife were moving from their home state of Texas to D.C. to raise their children in an environment less hostile toward families such as theirs — a Black one with two moms. My jaw dropped when Stevenson shared during another conversation last week the moment that the decision became inescapable: London, one of her twin 8-year-old sons, came to her worried that the governor of Florida was going to come to Texas “to be in cahoots with” its governor and “kill” families such as their own. Stevenson was so alarmed, she canceled a business trip to stay home with her son.
Children listen — intently. They absorb all manner of information like little sponges. Yet, for all that capacity, they still lack the life-learned filters that allow us adults to discern true danger from political hyperbole. So it’s no wonder that Stevenson’s son was worried about potential actions by Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis, the Republican governors of Texas and Florida. The former has sicced state authorities on trans children and their families seeking gender-affirming care. The latter sought to erase whole groups of people when he signed into law the so-called Stop Woke Act and the legislation dubbed by critics as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which limit what can be taught and said about marginalized groups in the classroom.
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FollowIn fact, LGBTQ Americans are under political and cultural attack all over the country. A Nebraska high school’s newspaper was shut down in June after students published columns on LGBTQ issues. A library in Jamestown, Mich., was defunded last month because staffers refused to remove an LGBTQ book. Adam Graham, the youngest and first out gay mayor of The Village, Okla., cited safety concerns when he resigned in July, just two months after he was elected. Is this the world Republican senators want?
How far we’ve fallen since that heady day in June 2015 when the Supreme Court said same-sex couples could marry and colored floodlights turned the White House rainbow. It was a high-water mark of this nation’s ability to live up to its founding ideals.
Today, things look more like Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion in the Supreme Court ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade. Thomas argued that the marriage-equality decision is one of several landmark rulings the court “should reconsider” — because Thomas finds the rationale for granting Americans such baseline rights as marriage and contraception access “demonstrably erroneous.”
Stevenson told me that even if marriage equality were settled under law by Congress, she and her family still would have decided to leave Texas. “The entirety of the lived experience as a queer person in Texas, especially one with kids, is the issue,” she said. “If marriage were fixed, it doesn’t prevent Texas state leadership from eroding other rights for my family.”
Nevertheless, codifying the right of same-sex couples to marry would bring at least a small measure of security to families such as Stevenson’s, no matter where they live. For other LGBTQ people on the fence about where they live, the guarantee might be enough for their families to feel safe staying put.
Senators should want to grant that modicum of ability. As for those who don’t, I look forward to witnessing them vote accordingly, without any procedural fig leaf for their awful position. Everyone should know who really respects marriage — and who stands “in cahoots” with the people legislating against queer families.
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Source: WP
