By Ann Rostow
No News Is Bad News for News Columnists
I was just checking for lesbian news on Google and took a test to see if I was, indeed, a lesbian. I came out 40 percent bi, 30 percent lesbian, 20 percent “don’t know” and 10 percent straight. Sorry testers, but you’ve got some ‘splainin to do. I think I liked men too much for the test, but I didn’t mean it that way for God’s sake! Plus, two of the questions basically asked how you would categorize yourself, and I checked lesbian on both. Is that not dispositive?
My problem is that I had not yet asked for “news,” so I wound up on a generic list of lesbian websites, which included the seductive link to “AmIALesbian?” So much for that. I still maintain that the finger test works. Is your ring finger longer than your index finger? If yes, you’re a lesbian. If no, you’re straight. If undetermined, then by all means go take a quiz on the Internet to settle the matter.
Alternatively, you could rank your three favorite love affairs and figure out whether these romantic interests were female or male. I know. It’s the old school method.
Perhaps you’re wondering why our column begins, not with groundbreaking GLBT news, but with a random personal anecdote? Yes, you guessed it. The holiday gay news slump is upon us. Lawmakers go home for the month of December. Activists close their laptops. Gay bashers put down their sticks and stones. And I was going to say that our legal advocates file motions to delay except I just sent a question to Kate Kendell, head of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, and she said she was swamped with work. Good. At least someone’s out there slaving away on our behalf. We wouldn’t want the entire GLBT civil rights movement to come to a halt.
You recall from last week that the NCLR has asked the Supreme Court to issue an emergency order allowing visitation to a lesbian mother in Alabama who has been banned from seeing her three kids by the Alabama Supreme Court. That court, in direct violation to a couple centuries of legal precedent, ruled recently that the mother’s adoption was invalid, even though it was signed sealed and delivered by a Georgia court. We don’t have to be lawyers to understand that a state court cannot ignore a judgment from another state’s court, otherwise we’d live in a morass of legal chaos rather than a union of fifty states.
Federal law reigns, so of course a federal court can impose its will on a state ruling that defies federal law. But Alabama can’t tell Georgia that its adoption is invalid any more than Texas can tell Oklahoma that some dude from Norman doesn’t owe child support if he moves to Port Aransas.
At any rate, I was asking Kendell when the High Court might rule on the emergency motion and the answer is unknown. Meanwhile, the NCLR has also asked the justices to take the underlying case under review.
Do We Have John Roberts to Thank for Marriage Equality?
There was one big exception to the annual holiday lull, and that came in 2013 when a federal court in Utah ruled that marriage must be made available to same-sex couples immediately. Buzzfeed’s Chris Geidner has written an interesting article that traces the final trajectory of same-sex marriage that arguably began with that unexpected ruling. Not only was the ruling unexpected, but the decision to allow marriages to go forward at once was also a pleasant shock.
Geidner’s piece emphasizes the role of Chief Justice Roberts, and/or maybe Samuel Alito, in setting the stage behind the scenes for theObergefell marriage victory in June of this year. After all, we know that one or both of these men joined Anthony Kennedy and the liberal wing of the Court in deciding to allow marriage to become legal throughout most of the country by default as Obergefell made its way to the Supreme Court docket. It would have only taken four votes to leave antigay marriage laws in place throughout the tenth, seventh and fourth circuits when those three appellate cases came up for a decision in October of 2014. With just those four votes to accept review on any one of those marriage victories, the question of equality would have remained on hold for months. Instead, by rejecting those cases, the underlying rulings in favor of marriage went into permanent effect. So who gave our side the helping hand?
Shortly after that non-decision decision, the Ninth Circuit ruled in favor of marriage in an opinion that went into instant effect throughout the western states thanks to the High Court’s posture.
And by the time the Obergefell case hit the Court’s schedule, no less than 36 states were conducting legal marriages, hence the final decision had an impact on only a baker’s dozen or so of conservative states. Interestingly, those numbers were similar to the ones that governed theLoving ruling banning interracial marriage discrimination, and the Lawrence decision banning sodomy laws. What a coincidence!
The outcome was fairly clear as soon as the High Court let marriage equality become law in many parts of the country eight months earlier. We know that Justices Scalia and Thomas expressed disapproval when other antigay marriage motions failed to win votes, so who exactly cast that critical sixth vote back in October of 2014? Although he played his cards closer to the vest than Thomas or Scalia, I can’t believe Alito had any love for the marriage equality side. Ergo, it must have been Roberts who perhaps saw that marriage equality would no doubt win eventually, and who calculated that the shock to the nation and to the Court would be minimized if marriage was allowed to take root in stages.
Well, we won’t get the real skinny until the books come out, years from now. Or who knows? Maybe a clerk will spill the beans. The thing I wonder is this. What if the Court had taken review of one of the marriage victories in late 2014? Would we still have won? I think so. But I also wonder how the country would have reacted if that victory required 30 or more states to open the gates to marriage rather than 13. Happily, we’ll never know, because I don’t think it would have been pretty.
Myth Busters
I’m splitting my time between writing to you and trying to Drano the kitchen sink, which has overdosed on Thanksgiving leftovers. Drano never works for me, and frankly I think the entire drain de-clogging industry is a scam. You end up buying several bottles of this expensive stuff, pour it down the sink, wait thirty minutes or whatever, observe maybe a slight improvement, and finally call the plumber. I just gave it another shot, so we’ll see. If that wasn’t enough, Mel flushed our high tech car key down the john at school yesterday, and had to spend two hundred bucks on a special locksmith. Then the key turned up in lost and found this morning. Yesterday I felt so sorry for her stuck in the cold waiting for the lock guy that I bought her a bottle of 12-year-old single malt. So there’s another budget buster.
Kate Kendell thinks she’s got troubles!
Meanwhile, in other superficial lesbian Internet news, I noticed that Teen Vogue ran an article titled: “Ten Myths About Lesbians You Need to Stop Believing Now.” I admit that this is probably the sixth or seventh time I’ve read one of these “lesbian myths” articles. They’re all the same, and yet I keep clicking. No, lesbians are not all butch and sporty. No, we do not pick one of us to be the man and the other to be the woman when we form a couple. No, we don’t all like The L Word. No, we don’t hate men. Yes, we have great sex. I mean, come on, Ladies! Smarten up these listicles!
Is it a “myth” that we’re not checking out the straight girls in the locker room? Hell no! For all we know, they might be gay or bi, so of course we check everyone out in order to be thorough. Do we all assume that we will date someone after one drink and marry someone after one date? Do 85 percent of us count? Oh, I know you.
When I first moved to Austin, I put an ad on gay.com looking for a hot affair and informing prospects that my favorite activities were smoking and drinking. There were about 20 or so women on gay.com in Austin at the time, and virtually all of them wrote me back, the vast majority mentioning that they hated smoking and/or drinking and were not interested in having an affair. Say what? But they all wanted to meet for “coffee” because they thought my profile was intriguing. Oh, right. Personally, I think the expression “coffee date” is an oxymoron. You can have coffee on a date, of course, but only if she’s fixing you breakfast. (Drum roll.) This is just to say that unattached lesbians are usually looking for love, and often in the wrong places.
Bubbles All Around
I know that this column is devoid of actual news, but I believe I warned you about that from the start. I have been searching for interesting topics on Google for days with little success. My favorite headline is from The Mirror’s web site, and reads: “Mum of two attacked Gay Village revelers with broom after legal high binge.” Legal high binge? Sounds like fun! (And where were the kids during this melee?)
I have also found a bunch of stories about antigay sentiment in Russia, an article about a pro hockey referee who is gay, items about antigay preachers, a list of 15 myths about gay men in addition to the 10 lesbian myths, and a piece about a married lesbian in Wisconsin who is getting pushback from the courts on her effort to clarify that she is the legal parent of their child (who was artificially conceived by her wife).
Now that I’ve complained about a news drought, be prepared for an onslaught of major GLBT stories to inundate us just as this issue of the San Francisco Bay Times goes to press. And because I know you want to know, the mum of two was a 30-something woman named Rebecca Lowrey. Lowrey went to a gay nightclub in Manchester last January, met a gay man and a woman, and wound up drinking all night and taking a drug called “bubble.” Later, the man put the moves on her, reportedly as a joke, and Lowrey turned on both of her new friends and whacked the stuffing out of them with the aforementioned broom. She was recently given a suspended sentence and promised never to do such a thing in the future.
For your information, bubble is slang for mephedrone, and is also referred to as “drone,” “M-Cat,” white magic,” and my favorite, “meow meow.” Sadly, the cocaine-like substance is, in fact, illegal in the U.S. We are stuck with booze.
And you should also know that actress Holland Taylor confirmed that she is indeed a lesbian, as most of us knew. I knew because my buddy Dan told me that he saw the woman who plays Captain Janeway on Star Trek Voyager engaged in what looked to be a romantic tete a tetewith another woman in a hotel bar. For some reason, I thought he was talking about Holland Taylor, so I knew she was gay. Now I’m thinking he was talking about Kate Mulgrew, because I looked up Taylor and couldn’t find any reference to her Star Trek role.
I’m so confused. Mulgrew is twice divorced, but as all thoughtful lesbians agree, that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Indeed, that’s probably why she was sneaking around in the hotel bar! Or maybe Dan was talking about Holland Taylor to begin with and I got it wrong at the time. Whatever. Mulgrew is great as the Russian queenpin in Orange Is the New Black, but personally I never cared for Captain Janeway. She was superficially steely, but always on the verge of a feminine meltdown.
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