Citizens for Civil Rights

Last week I went to a meeting entitled “Political Participation 101.” This was in West Lafayette, Indiana. Presenting was the President of “Citizens for Civil Rights” (One of those gay groups—much like Human Rights Campaign—which is reluctant to have gay (or queer, or homosexual, or lesbian) in its name.

Indiana is in the process of amending its constitution. The amendment is as simple as it is mean-spirited: “This Constitution or any other Indiana law may not be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents of marriage be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups.” Indiana requires amendments to pass in two consecutive legislative sessions, and then be voted on by the citizens. It has already passed one legislative session by a wide margin, despite all the participatory tricks suggested by the Citizens for Civil Rights: hand-written letters to our state representatives and senators, along with e-mail and phone calls, and visits to the state capital. The President of Citizens for Civil Rights is public school civics teacher, and it shows—especially in the red-white-and-blue neck-tie he occasionally wears.

I’m not writing this as a reaction to this sad, hopeless little meeting that only served to underline the fruitlessness of a despised minority playing by the majority’s rules in a modern democracy. I’m writing in response to the death of Rosa Parks. Citizens for Civil Rights would never advocate breaking the law. It would never advocate getting off your ass and sitting where they have forbid you to sit. Citizens for Civil Rights are white, professional gays and lesbians. They are not going to risk arrest, because arrests would put their upper-middle class life-styles in grave jeopardy. If jailed, who would make their suburban home mortgages and SUV payments? An arrest as “troublemakers”? What corporation or bureaucracy wants to hire troublemakers? Citizens for Civil Rights are Team Players. These Citizens for Civil Rights aren’t ready to do what Rosa Parks did, and they aren’t going to win any victories for gay marriage or much of anything else until they are. The folks “fighting” for gay marriage don’t have enough fight in them, and they never should have picked that fight in the first place.

Anyway, another thing bothered me about The president’s presentation: his open disgust at the very last word in the proposed amendment: “groups.” In past messages, and again that evening, he expressed in no uncertain terms how “groups” in marriage-like relationships disgusted and insulted him—as it should every self-respecting citizen for civil rights. Polygamy! Group sex! Citizens for civil rights are just as disgusted with it as their detractors. Of that I have little doubt. But in his open expression of disgust I could see the process beginning: the process of identity formation through exclusion: we are the good, professional, monogamous type of gays and lesbians, and we are just as disgusted-- and just as ready to oppress—the other kinds as any conservative Republican. We are actually, deep-down, so much like you we can even swap neck-ties.

I did a quick memory check to determine if I myself ever engaged in “group” sex. That’s when I remembered all that edgy, high-risk excitement when me and the neighbor boys used an old abandoned VW van in the back of the neighborhood junkyard to play repeated games like “naked hippies.” It was 1968. I was eight. My friends were six, eight, eight and ten. It was fun. It was group sex.

I can never go back to that kind of fun, and I became sad. If kids today were caught having that kind of fun, half would be labeled as sex offenders in the making, and the other half victims of unspeakable crimes scaring them for the rest of their lives. That makes me sad, because I realized that citizens for civil rights wouldn’t recognize my or my friends’ right to have that kind of raucous, unrestrained fun. Not in as boys in 1968, nor as men in 2005. Sad because I stopped focusing on what citizens for civil rights can do to our freedoms, and instead remembered what they’ve already done to them.