CIVIL UNIONS AGAIN: Elizabeth Marquardt

[Comments, as always, also worth your time. --Eve]


Today's NYT has an article on the tactical retreat now being organized among SSM advocates. In the wake of the election and 11 state referendums passing, leaders are now saying they must abandon the fight for SSM, for now, and focus on more winnable goals like civil unions.

Apparently, now, the words "civil unions" can be uttered again.

I guess I'm less than elated. For the past year my position has been that I am against SSM and for civil unions. For that I've been accused of "soft bigotry." That position was the final death-knell in an already fragile friendship and also scored me an email by an old, friend-of-a-friend who ended her scathing remarks with "look what you've become." I've been told and heard for a year that to support civil unions is to support a "separate but equal" position. Might has well go back to Jim Crow, some have suggested.

So, yes, I still support civil unions. But there is hardly the warm and fuzzy, let's-all-work-together-on-this feeling that might have existed earlier. The NYT article ends with one advocate who says that the battle for SSM is, for now, not in the courts but in the culture. Well, my friend, the last year mattered, and the "nothing less than full marriage rights, now" position lost you some serious ground in the culture.

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posted by Eve at 7:59 PM VOTE

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