I so wanted to not write about marriage. Across the Caribbean this week, everyone else was celebrating or hand-wringing over a court decision adding the remaining quarter of the United States and their 90 million citizens to a billion people who already enjoyed equal-marriage rights globally across 20 nations–four of them for at least a decade; five other Americas neighbours; one South Africa.
Ten media outlets wanted my comments. That's never happened for any local issue. I was puzzled by the size of fuss the world is making. The Queen of Bacchanal holding a rainbow big flag and singing about Lucy's coming out to screaming LGBTI crowds from a mainstage at Toronto's Pride festival seemed to me the more transformative news story of the week.
Why was there nowhere near the panic or cheering a month ago, when 62 per cent of Ireland's voters, in a breathtaking act of direct democracy, voted for equal marriage (absolutely not how plural states should award human rights to any group–as Irishwoman Mary King proposed here in 2011–but nonetheless stunning). Nothing in close measure when the old mother country legalised gay marriage last year, a year following Westminster's vote.
Hardly a whisper when days after Obergefell Mozambique brought the list of African countries that do not criminalise homosexuality to 20. I said woohoo! for America. But mine wasn't among the 26 million rainbow-filtered Facebook profile pics. But the US Supremes had the region quaking, rainbowing and imagining Caricom convening to discuss the matter; and Guyana prize winner Ruel Johnson boasting to those afraid of a homosexual "epidemic [of] Ebola...proportions" that he was "Typhoid Mary of Guyana because I support gay rights passionately but I still worship pudenda [not his word] to the exclusion of other genitalia." I was fascinated.
Growing up, I learned what it means to hide your birth certificate. For years, I witnessed Mommy demean herself, clutching onto a marriage long over, even as I was out seeking other men to daddy me. During my illegal New York years, I watched gay and lesbian Trinbagonian friends enter green-card marriages with each other to escape life here, become citizens, divorce–and pay the favour forward with a second marriage. (I was too visible an activist to succeed.) I know no long-term relationship, straight or gay, that's been faithful. So forgive me if I'm a marriage sceptic. I want to fight for the right to not be married. For the law to promote single fathers' fullest roles in their children's lives. To outlaw girls being wedded off at 14 by pundits, 12 by imams, and 16 by babalawos. For expectant schoolgirls to be entitled to a full education. For PNM leaders and pregnant teachers alike to be afforded respect. For people from all family forms to enjoy the same dignity and opportunity.
I celebrate the UNC's 1998 Cohabitational Relationships Act. I want be able to use its protections for my own non-marital partnerships; and for more heterosexuals too. In my advocacy, I used to avoid gay marriage, change the subject, pretend no one gay here was interested. It's an issue that sucks up way too much air for what it's worth, and its deeply polarising nature can foreclose winning other gains Caribbean LGBTI communities need more urgently.
But the Supremes have us dancing to its tune, and Jim Obergefell has opened up an explosion and mainstreaming of discourse that makes me confident just as racial and gender equality spread globally, so too will marriage equality. And the pluck to admit the preachers fearmongering that recognition of gay rights will eventually lead to marriage are right: it will. But nowhere has any State forced any faith to perform such weddings. As Archbishop Joe told the same radio audience he told the Catholic church won't oppose Kamla decriminalising homosexuality–it's a civil matter.
Marriage reconnected me with Columbia law professor Katherine Franke, a staunch marriage critic I co-chaired an international gay-rights group with. She recently told the New York Times marriage has "never been a particularly generous or safe place for woman, and indeed has been the source of many women's oppression....So I find it kind of curious that marriage has become the vehicle for gay liberation...for a group of people who were not that long ago criminals to be asking for the state to regulate our most intimate relationships.
The main argument...is that same-sex couples deserve the dignity...or...'ennoblement' that marriage confers. What it implicates is that all the other relationships that don't look like marriages...are somehow worthy of the shame and the indignity that they suffer." Hers is one of many critiques of how marriage and its advocates have hijacked the US LGBTI rights movement.
In my view, it's also prevented people in same-sex relationships in local places around the world from being understood outside of some globalised ideological, religious "culture war" framework. But no matter how much we say it's about discrimination, violence or kids' self-esteem, politicians instinctively intuit that what gay people want is to have how we love recognised. The tear-jerking power of that legitimation beamed across the world this week.
Franke's critique of marriage and respectability draws me back to our cowardly politicians at home, happy to deny us discrimination protections 80 per cent of the nation supports, because it makes them seem respectable or win evangelical votes. They tell American investors boldly they'll keep our love criminalised, as our PM (whose own sex life, like the Opposition Leader's, is now headlines) did famously last September.