This is not my last or first word on the topic of gay marriage. Many years ago when this was just becoming THE issue in the LGBT community, AIDS activism was splintering, and marriage seemed to be THE stage-managed solution, I penned an editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle expressing my non-support of gay marriage. I said it demanded conformity that queers were not about; and that it was predictably spearheaded by privileged white gay men and lesbians, who had a real stake in this fight that fast-food or domestic workers, mostly of color, did not. What did marriage between two poor Black fast-food workers without health care mean? What cache did it offer them towards a better life? Nothing!
The morning the editorial appeared, many of my teacher colleagues would not speak to me until one approached me and challenged: "what did you mean by this?"
What I mean is that I do not confuse at all economic and social equality, nor do I think they can be separate things. You cannot have one without the other, and I am just old enough to throw back in your face anyone that says one can be a "step" to the other. You might as well tell me to wait my turn and know my place.
Gay marriage is social development without economic development: it is like building schools for communities whose parents have no jobs It is like donating a library for a community whose children have no shoes.
It is, in short, a very typical Western tactic. The West's empires will assuage restless colonials with garbage but never, never economic development because this risks making the colonial a competitor.
What is social development for people who have little and lessening economic viability in a white supremacist capitalist system but an empty promise?
The opposite is just as true but more revealing: what is having economic wealth and yet be marginalized socially?
This is the dilemma the white lesbians and gays found themselves in as they continued to reach the pinnacles of their professions but forced by laws to be in the closet.
Meanwhile, racial minorities continued to menace this wretched Western Experiment founded by hate groups, like the Pilgrims, on the corpses of Native Americans. Racial minorities continue on the trajectory being a refuse population. And yet, THE program offered by the LGBT hierarchy - Lambda Legal, Human Rights Campaign, the ACLU - is solely and uniquely marriage.
These whites are like the 17th century bourgeoisie who grew wealthy as Commoners (from the trade in Africans!) but as Commoners had zero standing in the Royal Courts of France and Great Britain, which held on to feudal ritual. These bourgeoisie only gained social status to match their economic status by waging revolution; they did to some kings and courtiers what we find so abhorrent in the Middle East: heads had to be dismembered from some bodies. Then with Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity in their mouths, they expanded the trade in human cargo, depopulated generations of brain trust from the African continent, enriched themselves, and told us it was the Age of Enlightenment.
Their progeny today don't give a goddamn in hell for the social and economic condition of Black and Brown peoples: they do care to what extent we support their agenda. We are still their human cargo, so they keep assuaging us with broken lies and broken treaties that tomorrow will be as bright for us as today must be made for them.
What do I mean by this? I mean that the only equality that has any meaning is jointly economic and social as one. The only way to attain this FOR EVERYBODY is a Revolution. Didn't our European counterparts already prove that time and time again? Appealing to the moral conscience of a people who have no conscience is a waste of time. So while I'm indifferent to anyone's marriage, I am not fooled that this move by the US Supreme Court today is a step for progress while me and mine keep getting dragged back into another century.
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