[Vision2020] For Some, Same-Sex Marriage Is Not Politics, It’s Personal

Art Deco art.deco.studios at gmail.com
Tue May 15 09:39:02 PDT 2012


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May 15, 2012
For Some, Same-Sex Marriage Is Not Politics, It’s Personal By HELENE
COOPER<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/helene_cooper/index.html?inline=nyt-per>and
JEREMY
W. PETERS<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/p/jeremy_w_peters/index.html?inline=nyt-per>

WASHINGTON — Some of their best friends turned out to be gay.

Or a daughter (Dick Cheney). Or a close pal (Jon M. Huntsman
Jr.<http://elections.nytimes.com/2012/primaries/candidates/jon-huntsman?inline=nyt-per>).
Or a couple seated close by (the Maryland lawmaker Wade Kach).

President Obama’s embrace of same-sex
marriage<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/s/same_sex_marriage/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>rights
last week instantly touched off speculation about the possible
political implications, but that misses a more nuanced point. Like so many
other Americans in recent years, politicians are less influenced by party,
faith or color on the question of favoring greater legal protections for
gays, both liberals and conservatives say.

Instead, it’s more personal.

“If you don’t know anyone who’s gay, then it’s an alien lifestyle,” said
Theodore Olson, the former solicitor general for President George W. Bush
who supports same-sex marriage. But, he added, when “you realize that
that’s Mary from down the street, she’s a lesbian and she’s with Sally,
what would it be like if they couldn’t be together?” people come around.

During the civil rights movement, many white Northerners — including some
who had never before interacted with black people — joined
African-Americans to fight for the principle of equal rights, often
opposing white Southerners who had lived among blacks all their lives yet
saw nothing wrong with the separate but equal statutes. Principle seemed to
come before the personal in many cases.

With the gay rights movement, it often seems that the opposite applies.
While there are many people who support gay rights because it is in line
with their personal or political views, for many others, their approach on
the issue is experiential, and comes down to a simple issue: knowing an
openly gay couple. In fact, it can seem as if there are two Americas when
it comes to gay rights: one in which same-sex couples interact regularly
with their straight counterparts, helping to soften impressions of
homosexuality, and another in which being gay or lesbian remains largely
unspoken.

Take Maureen Walsh. By night, Ms. Walsh runs Onion World, a sausage
restaurant in Walla Walla, Wash., with her family. But by day, she is the
Republican state representative for a district in the state’s conservative
southeastern corner. She said she had no problem with domestic partnerships
for same-sex couples. But when it came to marriage, she drew the line. Then
she started thinking about her 26-year-old daughter, who recently came out
of the closet.

“In some selfish way I did think what an affront to my beautiful daughter,
who deserves something everybody else has in this country,” Ms. Walsh said
in an interview, recalling how her decision to vote yes on the same-sex
marriage bill that passed in Washington in February sprang more from a
motherly impulse than from any political or ideological reasoning.

“It’s selfishness, but it’s motivated by love,” she said. “And I’d rather
err on the side of love, wouldn’t you?”

Then there’s Terre Marshall, a Republican delegate from Hawaii and
professional public speaker who once attended a predominantly
African-American church in Boulder, Colo., that advocated — as she, too,
did then — the traditional view of marriage as between a man and a woman.
About a decade ago, Ms. Marshall received a bombshell: a sobbing telephone
call from her best friend and business partner who disclosed that she was
lesbian, and that her relationship with a woman who Ms. Marshall had
thought was a roommate, not a girlfriend, had just ended.

“How could I have missed something so important to my closest friend?” Ms.
Marshall said.

Right away, she said, any opposition she had had to gay rights dissolved.
“I realized that I could care less about her sexuality. What I cared about
was my friend.” It didn’t take long for Ms. Marshall to find her way to
supporting gay marriage.

Even some who once considered homosexuality amoral said they were surprised
to discover how quickly their perceptions changed once they were forced to
put a face to something they had considered only in an abstract sense.

Mr. Kach, the Republican state delegate from Maryland, provided a pivotal
vote for the state’s legalization of same-sex marriage earlier this year.
In an interview, Mr. Kach recalled how not so long ago he became incensed
when his local newspaper ran a picture of a gay couple and their child on
its front page for a story about Father’s Day.

“I was just absolutely appalled,” he said. “I didn’t think of them as a
couple. I thought of them as people who were engaged in that,” he paused
before saying, “the homosexual activity.”

Then he attended a legislative hearing on same-sex marriage in February.
Because he arrived late, he had to sit next to the witness table where he
found himself eye to eye with gay couples who were testifying. One was a
pastor whose partner was ill with cancer, Mr. Kach said.

“I’m sitting there watching the one with cancer rub the back of the one
who’s testifying,” he said. “I just saw the love and the devotion that they
had to one another.”

Mr. Huntsman, a former Republican presidential candidate and governor of
Utah, said his position supporting civil unions hardened in 2007 after the
gay partner of a close friend was barred from the emergency room as his
friend’s son lay dying after a swing-set accident.

“You can’t experience something like that without saying, ‘Where’s the
fairness?’ ” said Mr. Huntsman, a Mormon, whose religion strongly condemns
homosexuality. Mitt Romney, a fellow Mormon, does not support civil unions
or gay marriage.

On Capitol Hill, Representative Nan Hayworth, a Republican from New York
who swept into Congress on a wave of Tea
Party<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/t/tea_party_movement/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>support,
became one of only a handful of Republicans to join the
Congressional gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender caucus. Her son is
gay. And Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a conservative Republican who
represents many gay constituents in a district that spans from Miami to the
Florida Keys, became the first in her party to co-sponsor of legislation to
repeal the Defense of Marriage Act.

Justice Lewis Powell of the United States Supreme Court was perhaps one of
the most famous public figures to come around on gay rights. He voted in
1986 to uphold a criminal sodomy law, telling his law clerk at the time, “I
don’t believe I’ve ever met a homosexual.” The clerk, who was gay, replied,
“Certainly you have, but you just don’t know that they are.”

Justice Powell later said that he regretted his vote.

Helene Cooper reported from Washington, and Jeremy W. Peters from New York.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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