Gay marriage is a controversial topic right now in America. In many ways, the debate was pushed into the spotlight by the narrow passage of California’s Proposition 8 back in 2008.
The bill, which constitutionally defined marriage as a union between a man and a woman, has since made a long and convoluted journey through the state’s court system.
In 2009, the American Foundation for Equal Rights filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court on behalf of two gay couples that were denied marriage licenses based on their sexual preferences.
In a 2010 non-jury trial, a federal district judge ruled the state’s ban on same-sex marriage unconstitutional. Proposition 8 proponents appealed the decision to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. A three-judge panel upheld the decision, and on June 5 of this year, the 9th Circuit Court denied a request to have the matter reconsidered by a larger panel.
The ruling opens the door to the possibility of Proposition 8 being reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court.
With the issue so strongly fixed in the minds of the public, the Sun decided to talk to people on both sides about why they feel the way they do. Here’s what they had to say.
For the Bible tells him so
Father John Mayhew is a priest specializing in Hispanic ministries at St. Louis de Montfort Parish in Orcutt. Born in England, Mayhew was ordained in 1965, and went on to teach math, religion, and music at St. Joseph High School in Santa Maria.
Mayhew told the Sun that during seminary he was taught “the consistent teaching of the church” on marriage, which he chose to embrace.
“Marrying someone in the church isn’t like presenting someone with an award or giving a rose to a mom in the church on Mother’s Day. It’s beyond that,” he said. “The way we look at it, marriage has a spirituality, and this spirituality is rooted in the New Testament and on 2,000 years of subsequent reflection. It comes right out of the Old Testament.”
He said the origin of marriage is described in the books of Hosea, Zachariah, and Isaiah, and in St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. The language in all of those texts, he said, has clearly defined gender roles.
“There’s the male … he’s got his qualities and strengths, and so does the female. They have to listen to one another and be subject to each other out of reverence for Christ,” he said. “There is the male and female physiology, and the organic differences, too, [that affect] how they care for their kids and interact with their families and in-laws.”
Mayhew explained that by committing to each other through the sacrament of marriage, man and wife are transformed by love, the same way Christ and his bride, the church, were transformed.
“Catholics have a very strong concept of church and that’s what separates us from other Christian faiths,” Mayhew said, adding that other people, even other Christians, see the Catholic Church as organized religion.
“They see it as the Vatican, as a bunch of superannuated old men figuring out some stuffy, old laws for young married people, coming into the bedroom and blowing a whistle,” he said. “It’s a fossilized view, which has nothing to do with anything.
“First of all, the Vatican is a country. It’s not the church. The Vatican is related to the church as this parish office is related to the parish. This does the paperwork; the Vatican does the paperwork,” he said.
Catholics, he explained, view the church as the bride and body of Christ, into which Catholics are baptized.
“St. Paul makes it quite clear that that is the model for husbands and wives, and marriage,” Mayhew said. “Did Paul think this up? No. It comes from the Old Testament very strongly in the covenant between God and his people.”
Mayhew also referenced Paul’s letters to the Romans, which he said argue boldly against homosexual practices.
The Romans, and even the Greeks, were a pagan people, he said. They had Roman-Napoleonic law, philosophy, architecture, fashion, drama, and literature.
“They had all that but they didn’t have the insights of Christianity. They exchanged the one true God for an imitation,” Mayhew said. He then read from the scripture: “That is why God abandoned them to the degrading passions. The women have exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural practices and the men in a similar fashion, too, giving up normal relations with women, are consumed with passion for each other, doing shameful things with other men, and receiving in themselves due reward for their perversion.
“The case that St. Paul is making here has always been interpreted as a case against homosexual love and homosexual activity,” Mayhew said. “Our church teaches that to be born homosexual is not a sin, to have homosexual tendencies is not a sin, it’s a disorder. But it’s something that one has to fight against, as one has to fight against heterosexual tendencies—like running after another man’s wife.”
Mayhew said he tells young Catholics it’s quite possible to pass through a stage in which one might label oneself as having strong homosexual tendencies, but either those feelings will diminish or the person will choose to deny them and settle down in a heterosexual relationship.
Sacraments like prayer and confession, he said, can help people deny their homosexual urges, just as a priest chooses to be celibate.
“I’ve known gay people, and I’ve heard their confessions, too. They know they’re gay but they have a family and they’re fathers of a family,” Mayhew said. “There was one man, he was a good father with a happy family, all contented, but he knew he was gay. I think he’s winning a big victory. Sex is not life, and life is not sex. It’s a lie to say you can have sex whenever you want, however you want, and with whoever or whatever they want.”
Sex, he said, is a gift from God that is shared between a man and a woman who have stood up in church, before God and their families, to say that they’re going to spend the rest of their lives together.
“The Catholic Church has been in this for 2,000 years now. It’s had its ups and downs, but it will never concede on [marriage]. You’ll never see them marrying a gay couple. There might be a priest somewhere who might do that, but he’d be yanked out of his job right away,” Mayhew said.
He said the church doesn’t object to civil unions because they’re regulated by the state.
“The law’s all there. They’ve got the law on their side. The state is regulating it all. I can’t see what else they would want,” Mayhew said.
“But they want the blessing. They want to be called married in the full sense of the term. And we say, ‘Sorry, we can’t apply this. You’re not a candidate for this kind of spirituality,’” he said, gesturing to the Bible open on the desk before him. “This is revealed spirituality. This is a sacred book.”
The face of GRACE
Robert Hubbard is a board member of GRACE (Gay Rights Advocates for Change and Equality). He acts as the club’s “communicator,” meaning he does a lot of speaking in public and interviews with the media.
“Some people call me the face of GRACE because usually if you hear about GRACE, you see my face,” Hubbard said.
GRACE celebrated its third year as a club on May 26, also known as Harvey Milk Day, which commemorates the efforts of America’s first openly gay politician.
Hubbard said GRACE hasn’t had an official event advocating for gay marriage, but the club’s members are staunch supporters.
“I don’t think I know anyone in GRACE who’s against gay marriage,” he said. “But we’re not just a gay rights group; we’re against discrimination of any kind. Every event we do—and everything we stand for—it’s about promoting equality.”
Hubbard is following Proposition 8’s journey through the courts with a mix of emotions.
“I want to see it go to the Supreme Court. I hope they take it and I hope they overturn it because then it will be a huge federal issue,” he said.
He believes letting states set laws pertaining to gay marriage is just creating more confusion.
“I think in 10, 15, 20 years people are going to look back and be really saddened that this was an issue, as they have been with most civil rights bills that have gone through the Supreme Court,” he said.
Allowing gays to marry, he said, would be a huge step forward for American society. It’d be another chip off the block of discrimination.
“That we even have to ask, ‘Oh, should we let them get married? I don’t know’ … that it’s even a debate, to me, is honestly ridiculous. We’re debating someone’s credibility to be in a relationship,” Hubbard said.
And while he and his boyfriend would surely like to get married, Hubbard said the issue of gay marriage is much bigger than one person or one couple.
“Any time you separate people or make special laws that categorize them, it makes everyone else think they’re different,” he said, “and it makes other people think it’s OK to discriminate against them.”
Hubbard has experienced such discrimination first-hand: “I’ve had a hate crime against me. I’ve had violence against me for kissing another guy in public when I was in college. I’ve had good friends and relatives tell me that they didn’t believe in gay marriage.”
When those discussions come up, Hubbard said he tries to explain to people that banning gay marriage—or even having civil unions—creates a “separate but equal” mentality against gays, similar to the one faced by African Americans and other minorities.
“When people realize that love is love, and that we should all accept each other for who are, we will have progressed as a society,” he said. “Just because I’m marrying someone of the same sex doesn’t make it less valid.”
But what about people who argue that being gay—unlike the color of one’s skin, for example—is a choice?
“I can change me being gay just as much as I can change me being Blaxican—I’m actually black and Mexican. It’s the same thing,” he said.
When people tell him being gay is a choice, Hubbard said, “I turn it around to them and ask, ‘Did you choose to be straight? Did you say to yourself one day, ‘I’m going to like girls because that’s the cool thing to do’? … When you flip it on its head like that people say, ‘No, I didn’t choose to be straight. I just am.’ It’s the same for gay people.”
Hubbard first sensed he was gay as a child. His attraction to other boys, he said, made him feel like “the freak in the corner.”
“Nobody ever talked to me about it, so I always felt very alone,” he said.
That’s why he thinks making gay marriage legal, and passing legislation to teach about lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgender people in the classroom, is a good idea.
“Learning about other gay people in school would have made me feel so much more confident about myself and my future endeavors … instead of always feeling put down or hated for who I was,” he said.
Hubbard feels the debate about gay marriage has turned into what he calls a “save the children” campaign, which upsets him.
“It’s sad that people think, ‘We can’t let [children] know what gay people are,’ like knowing about gay people would make them gay,” he said. “Kids are really smart, and I think people don’t give them credit for being so smart. Just because you’re not talking about it doesn’t mean that they’re not picking up things elsewhere. I think not talking about it will make it even more difficult for them down the road.”
Do what you want, but don’t tread on me
For the past year, Santa Maria resident Tania Self-Kim has taught first grade at Patterson Elementary School in Orcutt. In the fall, she’ll transition to teaching sixth grade at Dunlap Elementary School.
“I think it’s a good change. I need rich curriculum. I like to talk about things,” Self-Kim said in a recent interview. “When you’re teaching kids their Bs and Ds—the B goes this way and the D goes this way—it can get a little mind numbing.”
Self-Kim was the first person to respond to a Sun Facebook post asking people to share their opinions about gay marriage for this cover story.
In her post, Self-Kim said she doesn’t have a problem with gay people getting married, but she does have a problem with “the gay agenda and schools.”
“When I said ‘the gay agenda,’ I meant the political movement. And this goes across many heated topics for me—feminism, racism, all of the isms,” she said. “When your fight for your rights starts to infringe on others’ rights, I have a problem. It’s really hypocritical if you stop and think about it.”
Self-Kim is most distressed by the Fair, Accurate, Inclusive, and Respectful (FAIR) Education Act and other bills like it that require public schools to teach curriculum on the historical achievements of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals.
California Gov. Jerry Brown signed the FAIR Act into law last year, but said textbooks wouldn’t be updated to reflect the change until around 2015. A conservative special interest group recently failed to collect enough signatures to place a referendum that would reverse the decision on the June 2012 ballot.
“I didn’t like the legislation that would have kindergarteners learning about alternative lifestyles—the gay lifestyle—in school, because parents didn’t have the ability to opt out,” Self-Kim said. “They could take [their kids] out of school, of course, but then their attendance was dinged.”
She feels parents should have the right to teach and explain things to their children the way they feel is appropriate.
“I don’t think it’s right for parents to teach their children to discriminate, but I don’t think it’s right for the government to step in and implement its own standards,” she said. “I strongly believe that sexuality and lifestyle choices shouldn’t be taught in a public school setting, especially when the kids are so young. They should be focusing on phonics and number sense and interacting with their peers.”
She said if it was historically documented that someone’s partner had a huge influence on history, then that’s understandable. But promoting someone’s sexual preference in the name of equality isn’t.
“Have we ever said in teaching history, ‘So-and-so did this, this, and this, and he was straight’? No. We’ve never tied sexual preference to someone’s accomplishments in history,” she said.
As a mother of two young boys, Self-Kim said she would be upset if they came home and started talking about sexuality and sexual preference.
And she thinks gay people should respect the opinions of people who feel that way, too.
“When you demand respect and demand that people honor a diversity of opinions, you have to do the same in return,” she said.
She feels legislation such as the FAIR Education Act doesn’t abide by that standard. And that’s why she voted in favor of Proposition 8 back in 2008.
“I voted for Prop. 8 for reasons other than gay marriage. I’m not adamantly opposed to gay marriage; it was the outlying issues culminating with couples’ right to marry,” she said, adding later in an e-mail to the Sun, “I saw the extent to which this ideology was being pushed onto people—in ways that would infringe on their rights, as parents, as people of faith. … I felt I had to choose between two ideals that I have strong feelings about.
“In light of the many rights already in place for gay partners, and as a parent, I felt more impassioned to advocate in my small way to say that it is not OK to force people to accept a lifestyle that they may deem morally wrong,” Self-Kim said.
In society today, children are being inundated with very adult messages, she continued. Whether a child is mature enough to discuss sexuality at a young age should be up to the parent.
“Once the children are older—high school or even junior high school—then yes, I think those topics should be discussed, carefully and respectfully,” she said.
‘Our family portrait shows love’
Three women raised 18-year-old Leilani Harris: her mother, Catherine; her maternal grandmother, Maria; and her grandmother’s partner, Chris.
“My mom was a single mom. Financially, she wasn’t always able to provide a house for us,” the Santa Maria High School graduate told the Sun.
So for a large portion of Leilani’s life, she and her mother lived with Maria and Leilani’s “other grandma,” Chris.
“I’m not sure exactly when my grandmother came out, but it was before I was born,” Leilani said of Maria, adding that her grandmothers have been together since before she was born as well.
“I didn’t really know [they were lesbians] until I was older, because I never really asked. It was just something that was normal to us. My grandmother’s partner was just another member of the family. She was just my other grandma,” she said.
When she was 11 years old, Leilani asked Maria why she wore a wedding band on her ring finger if she wasn’t married.
“And she and her partner said, ‘Well, we’d like to be married,’” Leilani recalled. “And then they explained to me that they … were in a relationship.”
She said that was the first time she thought of her family as different than other “normal” families.
But over the years, Leilani said, she’s come to believe that her family is normal.
“A lot of people who haven’t been in an LGBT [Lesbian, Gay, Bi, Transgender] family, or haven’t met someone who is LGBT, they might build a stereotype or stigma and think that it’s from another planet,” she said. “But, really, LGBT families are no different from their heterosexual counterparts: We love, we laugh, we cry. We’re there for each other in good times and in bad times just like any other family. We have our issues sometimes, maybe, but in the end we’re family.”
These days there are so many different definitions of family, she said, and each model of family—whether it’s the nuclear family, or two moms, or two dads, or one parent in the household—is just as legitimate as the other.
That’s why Leilani thinks gay couples should be able to get married.
“For me, it’s really personal. When I hear people speak so strongly in opposition [to gay marriage], I think, ‘How can somebody be against somebody’s family like that—somebody’s life, somebody’s family?’” she said.
Leilani said she tries to approach people who are against gay marriage with respect, using her personal experience of loving someone who is LGBT as a talking point.
“I think for a lot of people, knowing someone who is LGBT really does make a difference and changes people’s views because it’s easier to be accepting of someone when they care about them,” she said.
What hurts her the most, she said, is the argument that gay marriage is harmful to children.
“It especially hurts when people say that LGBT families can’t raise children because, for me, that is my family. They raised me,” she said.
Leilani never got to experience the nuclear family—living with her mom and dad at the same time—but she did live with her dad, who she said has some personal issues.
“That was more detrimental to my growth than ever living with my grandma and her partner. For me, I knew [their house] was always the one safe place I could go—the one place that was going to be consistent,” she said.
When Leilani lived with her mom, financial troubles made it difficult to find permanent housing. They lived in apartments, but when money got tight they rented rooms in other people’s houses or lived in hotel rooms.
“I knew that if things ever really got bad, my grandma and her partner were going to be there for us,” she said.
Last year Leilani was the president of her school’s Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA), and she currently serves as the GSA liaison for GRACE (Gay Rights Advocates for Change and Equality). She plans to attend American University in Washington, D.C., where she’ll study political science. She said she doesn’t know yet what she wants to be professionally, but she knows what she wants to do: “I want to continue advocating for social justice and equal rights.”
And if she could tell people who are against gay marriage one thing, it would be this: “I’d like them to know that our family is just like their family. No matter what our family portrait looks like—the makeup, the gender of our family portrait—it looks pretty much the same as theirs,” she said. “Our family portrait shows love, and that’s the most important thing.”
Contact Managing Editor Amy Asman at aasman@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jul 26 – Aug 2, 2012.
