Tag: gay rights

Civil rights for gays and lesbians — time permitting

If we get around to it.

That’s essentially the way the Senate is treating a major civil rights issue — full citizenship for gay Americans.

There now appears to be enough support in the U.S. Senate to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the Clinton-era compromise on gays serving in the military that forced gays and lesbians to lie under oath or risk being drummed out of the service. The law, which was viewed as a necessary middle ground at the time by some was just another legal impediment to full citizenship for the LGBT community because it meant that gays and lesbians were restricted from serving unless they kept their true identities hidden. Openly gay men and women were not allowed to serve with an institution that has traditionally been one of the definitions of citizenship.

So, now that the House has passed its repeal, it is up to the Senate, which will try to fit it in. How magnanimous.

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Judge tells armed forces to end DADT

Gay rights’ advocates can chalk up another victory. From The New York Times:

SAN DIEGO (AP) — A federal judge issued a worldwide injunction Tuesday stopping enforcement of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, ending the military’s 17-year-old ban on openly gay troops.

U.S. District Judge Virginia Phillips’ landmark ruling was widely cheered by gay rights organizations that credited her with getting accomplished what President Obama and Washington politics could not.

“This order from Judge Phillips is another historic and courageous step in the right direction, a step that Congress has been noticeably slow in taking,” said Alexander Nicholson, executive director of Servicemembers United and the sole named veteran plaintiff in the case along with the Log Cabin Republicans.

The judge said that

the law unconstitutional after a two-week nonjury trial in federal court in Riverside. She said the Log Cabin Republicans “established at trial that the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Act irreparably injures servicemembers by infringing their fundamental rights.”

She said the policy violates due process rights, freedom of speech and the right to petition the government for redress of grievances guaranteed by the First Amendment.

“Furthermore, there is no adequate remedy at law to prevent the continued violation of servicemembers’ rights or to compensate them for violation of their rights,” Phillips said.

The issue for me is not the impact on the military, which is the way that some supporters of overturning Don’t Ask Don’t Tell frame it. For me, the issue is citizenship: Gays and lesbians are either full partners in the American project — and can serve openly in defense of their country, get married and do all the other things that other Americans can do — or they can’t. And if they can’t, as people like New York gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino and other Tea Party candidates seem to believe, then the United States is not the nation we pretend it to be.

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  • Read poetry at The Subterranean.
  • Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. it can be ordered here.
  • Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.
Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Dispatches: We are all complicit in Tyler’s death

This week’s Dispatches is on the suicide of Tyler Clementi.

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  • Read poetry at The Subterranean.
  • Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. it can be ordered here.
  • Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.
Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Second-class citizenship

There is little to soften the ugliness of this story. Assuming that the allegations are true, what we have is a case of two college students having so little regard for the privacy of a third student that they essentially laid a trap in the hopes of catching him on videotape that could be posted to the Internet.

That the victim apparently committed suicide following the release of the video once again speaks to the stigma that gays and lesbians are still forced to deal with every day.

The facts are these:

Two recent graduates of West Windsor-Plainsboro Regional High School have been charged with secretly recording video of another person having sex and transmitting the video over the Internet. The victim, apparently one of the accused’s roommates, has committed suicide since the videos were made public.

Dharun Ravi, 18, of Plainsboro and Molly W. Wei, also 18, of West Windsor, were charged Tuesday with two counts each of invasion of privacy. The two are students at Rutgers University’s Piscataway campus and are graduates of West Windsor-Plainsboro Regional High School North.

Mr. Ravi and Ms. Wei are accused of secretly placing a video camera in another student’s room in a dormitory and transmitting the video online, according to an announcement from Middlesex County Prosecutor Bruce J. Kaplan and Rutgers University Police Chief Rhonda Harris. The prosecutor’s office said the pair transmitted “a live image” of an 18-year-old student.

Another Rutgers student, Tyler Clementi of Ridgewood, committed suicide by jumping off the George Washington Bridge on Sept. 22, Mr. Clementi’s family confirmed through their attorney, Paul Mainardi of Brown & Connery in Woodbury.

Mr. Mainardi’s office refused to confirm quotes attributed to him in other publications stating Mr. Clementi and Mr. Ravi were roommates. But the statement he released did say the family’s “representatives are cooperating fully with the ongoing criminal investigations of two Rutgers University students.”

A body had not been discovered Wednesday afternoon.

The story is difficult to digest. What could have been going through the minds of the two students who have been charged? And why would something like this drive a gay student to suicide?

I’m going to posit something: When you systematically and publicly deny equal citizenship to a class of people — in this case, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered — and a significant portion of your political culture believes it is OK to publicly denigrate that class, you create a situation in which that class can be targeted, in which the privacy of the class members is of no consequence.

The gay community has been denied the right to legally marry in most states. LGBTs are prohibited from serving their country in the military. And they continue to be looked upon with derision, as freaks or worse.

Our unwillingness to grant LGBTs full rights is a societal/cultural admission that we think of them as less worthy than the rest of us. It allows the stigma to remain in place and allows the hate to continue to flow.

  • Send me an e-mail.
  • Read poetry at The Subterranean.
  • Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. it can be ordered here.
  • Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.
Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.