Claiming that LGBT people are not yet free even after the U.S. Supreme Court decision on same-sex marriage, an article in The Nation, explained what should come next. Not surprisingly, “marriage equality” is not the main goal.
Threats to the LGBT movement include religious, cultural, economic and the political right, which target LGBT people, according to the four authors Urvashi Vaid, Lisa Duggan, Tamara Metz and Amber Hollibaugh
As usual, lumped in with gay rights is women’s sexual and reproductive “freedom,” and racial issues. “A religious liberty framework is being deployed to undermine all civil rights laws,” they claimed, and suggested that this will be the next battlefront in overcoming further opposition to LGBT lifestyles.
“We are barely maintaining the basic right to early-term abortion, but this and other reproductive rights are also increasingly eroding via differential access to reproductive healthcare,” they said. And though the SCOTUS (Supreme Court of the United States) decision permits same-sex marriage, the legal institution of marriage is still maintained while leaving unaddressed many sources of “queer social and economic misery.” Formal inequality still exists, they claim because the decision did not provide for more resources, or greater political power. Legal equality hides expanded substantive inequalities, they said.
“To move forward toward a better world for queers we need to form broad alliances for the achievement of real social justice: Get money out of politics, fight for universal social benefits (healthcare, child care, retirement) not tied to marriage or employers, expand the power of working people, demand government transparency, go to the root causes of persistent racial inequalities, endorse sexual and gender freedom. Queer people are affected by all of these issues, not only the last ones. We can’t be the mostly single-issue movement that our major organizations have been. We don’t lead single-issue lives.”
To start this process, they said, the United States should “disestablish” marriage. Get the state out of the marriage business all together. The LGBT movement should push to abolish the legal status, they argue. Legal marriage changes the “self-understanding” of the couple and confers “community” upon them. Legal marriage imposes an ethical authority and gives approval for a particular kind of relationship. Getting the state out of marriage, they say, will resolve the issue of liberty and freedom for queers in that they would not be constrained by the ethical and moral boundaries of legal marriage. All sorts of intimate relationships need protection the ethical limits. “Get rid of marriage as the proxy for deserving relationships, and those who are not married benefit.
In other words, some, perhaps most LGBT advocates are pushing for the removal of all moral restraint in terms of sexuality. Leave marriage to the “church, family, urban tribe, garden club,” whatever “real ethical authorities” you respect.
“So let’s get rid of marriage and create an intimate union status expressly tailored to protecting intimate care in its various forms… when we disentangle support for families from marriage we have an easier time doing the right thing by our fellow citizens.”
“We need to build a queer, radical, social justice movement that focuses on the differences in how we live our sexual orientations and gendered identities when we are poor and queer and working class and in communities of color,” they wrote. “It is our stubborn refusal to give up the possibility of living in a world where human beings may dwell without penalty or punishment, without paying a horrible price for what they are and who they love.
It is obvious that what the LGBT movement is really pushing for is the removal of the influence of scripture on society all together.
“France presented also the characteristics which especially distinguished Sodom. During the Revolution there was manifest a state of moral debasement and corruption similar to that which brought destruction upon the cities of the plain. And the historian presents together the atheism and the licentiousness of France, as given in the prophecy: “Intimately connected with these laws affecting religion, was that which reduced the union of marriage–the most sacred engagement which human beings can form, and the permanence of which leads most strongly to the consolidation of society–to the state of a mere civil contract of a transitory character, which any two persons might engage in and cast loose at pleasure… If fiends had set themselves to work to discover a mode of most effectually destroying whatever is venerable, graceful, or permanent in domestic life, and of obtaining at the same time an assurance that the mischief which it was their object to create should be perpetuated from one generation to another, they could not have invented a more effectual plan that the degradation of marriage…” The Great Controversy, page 271
“At the same time anarchy is seeking to sweep away all law, not only divine, but human. The centralizing of wealth and power; the vast combinations for the enriching of the few at the expense of the many; the combinations of the poorer classes for the defense of their interests and claims; the spirit of unrest, of riot and bloodshed; the world-wide dissemination of the same teachings that led to the French Revolution–all are tending to involve the whole world in a struggle similar to that which convulsed France.” Education, page 228
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