Search Results for: Gay Marriage

A Pivotal Early Moment for the Cheney Family and Gay Marriage

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cheney-book

“In 2004, Mary contemplated quitting her job on the Bush-Cheney reelection campaign because of the president’s support for the Federal Marriage Amendment, which proposed to ban same-sex marriage. As Mary recalls in her memoir, when she asked to discuss the matter with her father at the White House, Lynne and Liz joined them, and all three urged her to remain on the campaign—noting that they themselves disagreed with Bush on the issue. But they also told her they would understand and support her decision if she did resign. Mary chose to stay on and, later in that campaign, when Democratic nominee John Kerry and his running mate, John Edwards, each separately raised the issue of her sexuality during the debates, the Cheneys were furious. Lynne declared Kerry was ‘not a good man’ and denounced his ‘cheap and tawdry political trick.’ When Edwards debated their father, Liz and Lynne went so far as to stick their tongues out at him, while Mary glared at the Democrat and, borrowing one of her father’s famous expressions, silently mouthed the words ‘Go fuck yourself.’”

–Jason Zengerle’s in-depth background on the Cheney family, for Politico Magazine. Read more on gay marriage.

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November 21, 2013
Categories: Nonfiction, Quotes
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The Making of Gay Marriage’s Top Foe

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How an unplanned pregnancy during college changed the life and worldview of Maggie Gallagher, now one of the leading voices against gay marriage:

“On a mild November day, Gallagher and I are upstairs at City Bakery, near Union Square in Manhattan, where after months of requests she has agreed to meet me. As Gallagher tells it, she and the baby’s father were close; they had been together ‘on the order of one year,’ she says, so he might have been expected to stand by her. ‘My son’s father was my boyfriend at Yale,’ is how she describes their relationship. But when she told him she was pregnant, right before spring break in 1982, he vanished on her. ‘I was in his room and he had to go do something, and I was going to fly out in a couple of hours, had to get to the airport. And the last thing he said to me was, “I’ll be back in 30 minutes.” And then he wasn’t.’

“He just left her sitting in his room. And that was the end of them. When summer came, Gallagher moved home to Oregon and took some classes to finish her degree. In the fall, she gave birth to a baby boy, Patrick.”

Author: Mark Oppenheimer
Source: Salon
Published: Feb 8, 2012
Length: 33 minutes (8,308 words)

No Objections: What History Tells Us About Gay Marriage

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No Objections: What History Tells Us About Gay Marriage

Although gender parity between spouses would have been unthinkable at the founding of the United States, marriage laws have moved over time in this direction. In Anglo-American common law, marriage was based on the legal fiction that the married couple was a single entity, with the husband serving as its sole legal, economic, and political representative. Under this doctrine, known as coverture, the wife’s identity merged into her husband’s. She had no separate legal existence. A married woman could not own or dispose of property, earn money, have a debt, sue or be sued, or enter into an enforceable agreement under her own name. The spouses were assigned opposite economic roles understood as complementary: the husband was bound to support and protect the wife, and the wife owed her service and labor to her husband.

By Nancy F. Cott, Boston Review

January 11, 2011
Categories: Uncategorized
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No Objections: What History Tells Us About Gay Marriage

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Many features of marriage that were once considered essential have been remade, often in the face of strong resistance, by courts and legislatures. Economic and social changes have led to increasing legal equality for the marriage partners, gender-neutrality of spousal roles, and control of marital role-definition by spouses themselves rather than by state prescription. Yet marriage itself has lasted, despite these dramatic changes. Not only that: it retains vast appeal.

Author: Nancy F. Cott
Source: Boston Review
Published: Jan 11, 2011
Length: 14 minutes (3,704 words)

The Conservative Case for Gay Marriage

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Why same-sex marriage is an American value.

Author: Theodore B. Olson
Source: Newsweek
Published: Jan 9, 2010
Length: 13 minutes (3,373 words)

Meet the Gay Mormon Men (and Their Wives) Beseeching SCOTUS to Save ‘Traditional’ Marriage

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Gardner travels to Utah to talk to Danny Caldwell—a gay Mormon married to a woman named Erin—to try to understand why they are part of an amicus brief contesting the constitutional legalization of gay marriage.

Author: James Ross Gardner
Source: Talking Points Memo
Published: Jun 17, 2015
Length: 13 minutes (3,293 words)

Want to Prevent Gay Teen Suicide? Legalize Marriage Equality

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Growing up as a gay kid, life is a difficult puzzle. You keep getting crushes on the wrong people. If you’re a girl, you’re supposed to be going all gooey inside for Matt and Jason, the hotties on the lacrosse team. And if you’re Matt, you’re supposed to be pining for Ashley or Jessica — not yearning to run away to a jam-band festival with Jason.

Author: Steve Silberman
Source: PLoS
Published: Sep 30, 2010
Length: 7 minutes (1,980 words)

Where are the Gay Ladies of Cambodia?

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Illustration by Christina Chung

Lindsey Danis | Longreads | December 2019 | 16 minutes (4,081 words)

Since the new road is open, the bus ride to Siem Reap will only take eight hours. We spend an hour at the border, then an hour on the highway, then the driver kicks us all off the bus at a stucco house on what passes for a suburban street. From here, minivans leave for Phnom Penh, Kratie, and Siem Reap.

We slide against the stucco wall of the makeshift bus station, defeated. First we were overcharged for visas at the border. Then our bus was oversold, and the driver packed the aisle with plastic stools to accommodate 20 more people. Now, two hours into our journey, the bus is gone and we’re waiting on a minivan to take us the rest of the way. I wonder whether the new road exists, or if everything in Cambodia is a lie.

At last a van pulls up, but it’s bound for Kratie. A handful of passengers depart and the rest of us grumble. The crowd thins out as minivans come and go, until a dozen of us stand around waiting to go to Siem Reap. We’ve been waiting for over an hour when a rusted minivan with a cracked windshield appears. The driver shoves our bags under the seats then, out of space, tosses luggage to the roof where a second guy ties everything down.

My wife and I hurl ourselves into the van, claiming good spots. Sliding down the bench seat, she scrapes her thigh on a rusty spring that pokes through the vinyl upholstery. Our first-aid supplies are strapped to the roof. And my window doesn’t open. Off we go!

There’s no traffic on the new road. There’s nothing to see other than blazing fields as farmers burn the remnants of rice stalks, a practice that controls pests and nourishes the soil. Such dry-season agricultural fires occur elsewhere in Southeast Asia, but this is the first we’ve seen. The dirt is loose and red, except for where the land is on fire, where it’s a shocking black. The flames are so close I can feel the heat through the minivan window. My thighs glue themselves to the ripped vinyl seat, while my sweaty arm sticks to my wife’s skin.

Ten hours later, we reach the Siem Reap bus station. Guys on motorbikes circle the parking lot, calling out the price of a ride into town. Tired and pissed, we are not in the mood to bargain. We will walk to town, however long it takes. “Okay,” one guy says, once he sees we’re serious. “I will take you.”
Read more…

December 9, 2019
Categories: Editor's Pick, Essays & Criticism, Featured, History, Nonfiction, Story, Travel
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Marriage Proposal Follies

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Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Amy Deneson | Longreads | October 2018 | 16 minutes (4,022 words)

 

This will be the day

That you will hear me say

That I will never run away

– Prince, Diamonds and Pearls

 

On the day New York State legalized same-sex marriage, I proposed to my girlfriend in the New York Times Modern Love column. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

The column’s editor, Daniel Jones, had emailed me to request an essay he’d previously rejected for being too political. He explained the paper was dedicating part of every section in the Sunday edition to Marriage Equality. “If it’s not already committed elsewhere, there isn’t much time.”

I accepted his retraction and, being a personal-is-political kind of lesbian, sent back a few additions to his notes and ended the revision with a marriage proposal.

“Are you sure?” Jones called. “This will be the column’s first.”

“I’m ready, if you are, Dan.”

He recommended I find a way share the piece with her before Thursday, when the digital edition went live. “You want her to be the first to know.”
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October 22, 2018
Categories: Editor's Pick, Essays & Criticism, Featured, Nonfiction, Story
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‘Choose Marriage or Education’

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(Juan Pelegrín / Getty)

Madhur Anand | Brick | Fall 2017 | 18 minutes (3,526 words)

May his head burn! Your words are rocks thrown at my forehead! I will peel her skin off! Threats and insults like these do not sound that bad in their native Punjabi. Even when they are directed at loved ones. Even when they come from your own mother. The pronouns are catalysts for combustion, a quick, irreversible reaction, with only ashes for proof. However, an English word like partition can sit in an Indian’s mouth for hours, or even for a lifetime, in motion toward something shapeless, and then melted, gone. Sometimes partition represents a noun (a broken door), sometimes it is a verb (to divide into parts), but it is never clear who is at fault. An Urdu poet once called partition a birthday party for anonymous and a funeral for unanimity. A mathematician saw it in his mind as a fractal, a Koch snowflake, a continuous curve without tangents. A political scientist speaks only of before-and-after maps, the thick red Radcliffe Line. Nobody ever truly understands one another. Translation is never simple.

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Mother makes chapattis. They are perfectly round, a circumference entirely calculable by first measuring a tangent, thanks to the discovery of constants. The first one she makes is reserved for the Brahmin, who will come later in the day to pick it up. The last one she makes is for a crow or a dog, whoever comes first. The rest are for us, but there must always be one left over at the end of the day, reserved for nobody, for nothing. That is how Mother would define abundance if she knew the word in English. How she achieves it, on the other hand, is a mystery. I am already bathed, dressed in my salwar kameez, and outside, content to throw five nameless stones onto the cement floor. I grasp them in my fist in groups of one, two, three, and then four while tossing another straight up. That one will fall either where I want it to or where it will. I hope for intersection but do not worry too much about the outcome. The five of us are here now. Mother, father, sister, brother, and me. There will come a time when I will be the only one left of us. Still up in the air. Read more…

May 29, 2018
Categories: Food, Nonfiction, Story
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