VALENTINE'S DAY
Right to marriage rights
By
Deirdre Griswold
The legal right to marry the person you love, rather than
someone picked out for you by your family or your master, was
won in the bourgeois democratic revolution against
feudalism.
Or was it?
Same-sex couples are still fighting for this right. This
Feb. 12, they marked the second annual National Freedom to
Marry Day with activities in over 60 cities and more than 30
states. The organizers explained that the date was chosen for
the "combination of equality and love represented by President
Abraham Lincoln's birthday on the same date and Valentine's Day
two days later."
In New York, the Lesbian and Gay Immigration Rights Task
Force demonstrated outside the Immigration and Naturalization
Service on Feb. 11 protesting discriminatory treatment of
same-sex couples from different countries. They chanted, "Love
knows no borders."
The group says that 10,000 binational couples are affected
by laws that won't let them marry, thereby preventing them from
filing for residence permits. "As a consequence," the group
said in a statement, "many binational same-sex families are
forced to endure long separations and exorbitant travel
fees.... Our families have been and continue to be torn apart
because of the government's unwillingness to recognize our
relationships as valid and loving."
Events in California were kicked off by a press conference
in Sacramento that focused on an initiative against same-sex
marriages that will appear on the ballot in 2000. Those
speaking for the recognition of gay marriages included Assembly
Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa and Rev. Don Fado. Fado recently
organized an act of "ecclesiastical disobedience" in which he
and more than 90 other Methodist ministers joined in
celebrating the union of lesbian couple Jeanne Barnett and
Ellie Charlton in defiance of church doctrine.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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