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I awaited today’s DOMA decision, like many people, with mixed feelings. On the one hand, the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act this week shows just how little equal protection the most marginalized members of our society have. And marriage, straight or gay, is rooted in a complicated history of treating women as property to be traded between men. Marriage also discriminates on the basis of race, class, and, until today, sexual identity. After all, those wonderful marriage rights that gay and lesbian couples are fighting for are denied to the majority of Americans, most of whom are unmarried. And marriage is disproportionately white and for the upper and middle classes.
But no matter how critical I may be of the institution of marriage, I found myself crying as I heard news of the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v.Windsor. I do not cry easily. Yet I found myself moved to tears by the idea that the love shared by gay and lesbian couples would be recognized as the same as that shared by straight couples.
The case itself wasn't about love, but a sort of economic justice for the well-to-do. Edie Windsor was forced to pay $363,000 in capital gains taxes after Thea Spyer, her lifelong partner and more recent legal spouse, died. This tax was surely unfair since had Windsor's spouse been a man, she would not have had to pay a dime. But it is also unfair that some get to own million dollar apartments and others are homeless. In the grand scheme of unfair, it was not the sort of injustice that would move most of us to tears.
Yet the DOMA decision brought me to tears precisely because it recognized the authentic human emotion, the love, that existed between Windsor and Spyer. The Supreme Court recognized their love, and by extension all other same-sex marriages, as equal. According to the majority opinion, written by Anthony Kennedy, says
"The particular case at hand concerts the estate tax, but DOMA is more than a simple determination of what should and should not be allowed as an estate tax refund... DOMAs principal effect is to identify a subset of state-sanctioned marriages and make them unequal... DOMA... tells those couples, and all the world, that their otherwise marriages are unworthy of federal recognition... (T)he principal purpose and the necessary effect of this law are to demean those persons who are in a lawful same-sex marriage."
Regardless of marriage’s mixed up and even misogynist history, this Supreme Court’s decision is indicative of a seismic shift in this country. Just forty years ago this week, a gay bar in New Orleans called the Upstairs Lounge was fire bombed and 32 people were murdered. The police didn’t care enough about homosexuals to really investigate so no one was ever charged. Churches refused to bury the victims. DJs joked that they’d have to bury them in “fruit jars” just days after the massacre.
What a difference four decades can make. Today the dignity of all gay and lesbian citizens was upheld, even as this week the rights of many Americans of color to vote without discrimination was denied.
The Supreme Court has given us some strange fruit indeed.
