Sarah McBride: (Transgender Congresswoman) "Why The Left Lost On Trans Rights)

[TommyT139]

72. That's a perfect post, thanks. Do you not understand

...that his entire point of anger in that post was precisely that gay marriage was not being written into law?? That it was being left up to the courts to be trusted to not reverse the decision??

And that is exactly where we are now: looking at the response to explicit calls from the Supreme Court to overturn Obergefell.

As he said: he had been working on gay marriage as an activist and a professional since he was nineteen years old. He was on the team that won Obergefell. He could see better than anyone all the energy that went into same sex marriage. Clearly he thought it worth doing, for those decades he spent helping win that goal.

Yet as he also makes clear, other very important efforts were being ignored -- voting, abortion (agreeing with RBG, but that's another discussion), trans rights, and student loans. Do you think them less important for LGBTQ people because they affect more than just us? As we know now, every single one of those erstwhile rights is now far worse off -- far more subject to the political winds that once were balmy, but now blow cold. If as much attention and "lavender money" was given to, say, assuring voting rights, especially for communities of color, we'd all be better off now. But for better or worse, the "Gay Agenda" too often meant a white agenda, a male agenda, a disposable income agenda.

So after all that: I think the post of his you quoted was actually prophetic. Tragically so. To me it seems you are reading part of it through a narrow lense, as if he had offended you personally.

One last point - while it is clear to me even from that post that Chase decided to devote his early career to helping secure wins for gay marriage, my experience in the gay community was not that everyone was 100% in favor of securing access to this fundamental institution of our society. Far from it. There has always been a vocal segment of the LGBTQ communities that dreamed beyond the models of relationship we had grown up with.

In a way, you can see their lasting impact, with the increasing popularity of nonmonogamy, "throuples" (and more), polyamorous networks, and so on. Only a segment was vehemently anti-state-regulated marriage, but that was by no means an extreme minority. (I've even seen that view here on DU, especially from people who are anti-organized religion.) It was a pretty common viewpoint where I came from -- perhaps impacted by first the sexual 'revolution,' and then the AIDS crisis years. Maybe getting through the worst of that made people hungry all the more deeply for a return to something that seemed like normalcy, like acceptance. Well, we can see now how shallow that acceptance has been, and how transient.