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Monday, July 30, 2012

Do I Do? Dem Platform Endorses Gay Marriage

Washington Blade:
The Democratic Party platform drafting committee approved on Sunday language endorsing same-sex marriage in addition to other pro-LGBT positions as part of the Democratic Party platform, according to two sources familiar with the drafting process. Retiring gay Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who sits on the committee, told the Washington Blade on Monday that the 15-member panel unanimously backed the inclusion of a marriage equality plank after a national hearing over the weekend in Minneapolis, in which several witnesses testified in favor of such language. “I was part of a unanimous decision to include it,” Frank said. “There was a unanimous decision in the drafting committee to include it in the platform, which I supported, but everybody was for it.”
Eric and I have been very happily coupled for nearly eleven years now, but we regard marriage as a vestige of human trafficking complicit in a mostly harmful romantic ideology of monogamous reprosexual co-dependent "completion" that is not at all for us. And yet we cheerfully celebrate this decision as one that will help remove one more plank of the edifice of second class citizenship from which all queers suffer, as one that will lend more power to those who resist heteronormative forms by providing them the space to reject something available to them rather than merely complaining about something forbidden them anyway, and as one that will provide social support and render more publicly legible and in many ways more liveable many queer lifeways that are perfectly legitimate even if they are not quite our own.

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