Malinda Lo
Blog
Oct 2, 2008
News flash: homophobia is still totally acceptable
To the surprise of no one, Sen. Joe Biden turned out to be more knowledgeable than Gov. Sarah Palin in Thursday night’s vice presidential debate, while Sarah Palin turned on her populist charm. What surprised me? The gay marriage question (transcript from CNN).
GWEN IFILL: Let’s try to avoid nuance, Senator. Do you support gay marriage?
JOE BIDEN: No. Barack Obama nor I support redefining from a civil side what constitutes marriage. We do not support that. That is basically the decision to be able to be able to be left to faiths and people who practice their faiths the determination what you call it.
The bottom line though is, and I’m glad to hear the governor, I take her at her word, obviously, that she think there should be no civil rights distinction, none whatsoever, between a committed gay couple and a committed heterosexual couple. If that’s the case, we really don’t have a difference.
GWEN IFILL: Is that what you said?
SARAH PALIN: Your question to him was whether he supported gay marriage and my answer is the same as his and it is that I do not.
And after Palin’s remark, everybody laughed.
Let’s take a moment here. Joe Biden and Barack Obama agree with Sarah Palin and John McCain about how they do not support same-sex marriage. OK, I’m not an idiot. I know that nobody who is a serious contender for president is going to support same-sex marriage. But tonight I realized that this is freaking insane. Here we have the people who want to be the leaders of our country agreeing to discriminate against gay people. Well, thank God that we can all agree on something these days (that was sarcasm).
You know what else is wrong with this picture? I’m pretty sure that Obama and Biden personally support their gay friends who want to get married. I think there’s a possibility that John McCain does, too. (I believe Sarah Palin when she says she doesn’t support gay marriage.)
You know what a person is called when he says one thing but believes another? Hypocrite.
I’m not saying that there aren’t serious issues at stake in this election including, obviously, the war in Iraq and the financial meltdown on Wall Street. And I know that cultural change comes slowly. But it disgusts me that politicians asking for our votes openly invite us to support their hypocrisy and publicly express their homophobia.
I feel the same way, right down to the sarcastic statement about both sides finally agreeing on something (I said pretty much the same thing after hearing it). Thanks for writing this, you put it into words better than I possibly could.
Maybe it’s just because I like Biden, but a difference I picked up on (and it’s not in what you quoted) is that Biden said he supports /making sure/ that same-sex couples are guaranteed the same constitutional benefits, but Palin kind of wiggled out of that with “no one would ever propose, not in a McCain-Palin administration, to do anything to /prohibit/, say, visitations in a hospital or contracts being signed.” I don’t think anyone potentially enacting laws to prohibit hospital visitations and the like is the problem–it’s that in some states people are being denied visitation NOW, and she said nothing about being willing to change that. Biden implied that he is invested in changing that.
And then somehow because they both officially have the same position on gay marriage, that got turned into Palin and Biden being on the same page about gay rights. But maybe I’m overanalyzing their words.
Miriam — I like Biden too, actually, and I agree he did say all that stuff at first. I was pleasantly surprised when he even said the word “marriage” adjacent to “gay.” But in my opinion he negated all of that by agreeing with Palin. That’s the sound bite people will remember, not his rambling effort to sidestep the issue. Plus there’s the hypocrisy thing — that disappoints me.
Thank you! I’ve been waiting for someone in the gay community to write about Biden and Paulin’s responses with some version of outrage. And to my disappointment (but not surprise) most reactions have been favorable. We are so used to accepting the scraps they throw us that we too easily forget that equality is just that- equality. No matter how much I personally want a Democrat in the White House that doesn’t change the fact that neither candiate supports my equality.
I have to say that I really saw this exchange differently. I have a husband (though our marriage isn’t “legal”), and I would certainly love to have our marriage accepted across the nation. But, I actually stand with Joe Biden on this one.
“Marriage” is a religious institution and because we have a separation of Church and State in this country, I don’t believe that the government has the right to force religious institutions to wed gay couples if those churches do not believe in homosexual marriages. HOWEVER, marriage also allots heterosexual couples an enormous amount of rights and benefits that gay couples are currently denied. The GOVERNMENT has the responsibility of ensuring equal civil rights for all of its citizens. Civil Unions would give gay couples all of the legal rights of heterosexual couples, and that is the only battle we should be waging in the government.
Marriage, leave that to individual churches to decide. More progressive congregations already offer gay marriage, and with government backed support of civil unions, these marriages would be indistinguishable from heterosexual marriages. I want the RIGHTS, I don’t care what you call them and waging this war for “marriage” is taking us down a dead end trail. With a progressive democrat in the office, we stand a chance to have national civil unions in the next four years, but if we all keep pushing this marriage card then we are going to lose. For the sake of my own union, I certainly hope that doesn’t happen.
“Here we have the people who want to be the leaders of our country agreeing to discriminate against gay people. Well, thank God that we can all agree on something these days (that was sarcasm).”
Brilliantly stated. Discrimination is discrimination. You can put lipstick on it, but it’s still discrimination.