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Gay rights are in limbo in Baltimore. However, there is some progress being made nearby in D.C.. The nation has a revised hate crimes bill, which expands the definition of a hate crime to include gender, disability, sexual orientation and gender identity. In addition, the Washington D.C. City Council has introduced the Religious Freedom & Civil Marriage Equality Amendment Act of 2009, which will allow gay marriages to be performed within the district. The City Council is expected to pass the bill, but it needs to be reviewed by Congress before it can be made into law. Though there are fierce opponents to same-sex marriage in the GOP, it is very rare for Congress to strike down laws passed by the D.C. Council-it has only happened three times in the past 25 years. It will take a few months, but it looks like gay marriage has come to D.C. However, the current administration has made it clear that they do not intend to create federal laws anytime soon – they continue, time and again, to defend the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in the courts.
Baltimore (and Maryland as a whole) has had almost no reaction to either the positive or negative developments. This is actually harmful to the gay rights movement – in cases of civil rights, there is a precedent of individual states taking action long before the federal government follows suit with their own laws. This means that the nation is dependent on the action of individual states, and the citizens of those states depend on the action of their local governments to protect their rights.
This begs the question – why do Baltimoreans seem apathetic about the rights in their own city? This is a blue state, through and through, yet there has been little progress achieved here. Gay rights have never been a priority in this city – with the amount of poverty, crime, and the myriad of social and economic ills that Baltimore is plagued with, gay marriage has been forced onto the back burner.
Unfortunately, the popular scapegoat for the gay rights movement seems to be African Americans. True, when Prop 8 passed in California, poll results showed that the African American community tended to vote against gay rights measures in higher percentages than other ethnic groups. However, this statistic has been exaggerated to such an extent that advocates for gay rights tend to assume that cities with high black populations are essentially lost causes for gay rights. This is damaging to the gay rights movement, and to the black community; it is simply incorrect to assume that an entire race, made up of very different people, feels the same about any issue.
Recent progress in D.C. has proved that our assumptions about the role of race in the gay rights debate are based on a tendency to create a fictitious homogenous black community. When the council voted to allow same-sex unions from outside the district to be recognized within D.C., Marion Barry cast the only dissenting vote. The reason for his vote was racially based – he explained that his position was founded on the fact that “98 percent of [his] constituents are black, and we don’t have but a handful of openly gay residents.” Barry warned the council to move slowly with gay rights issues because he believes that the black community is united in their opposition to most of the measures. He cautioned that “[a]ll hell is going to break lose,” and followed up with a positively hyperbolic prediction: “We may have a civil war.” There was a protest after the vote to recognize same-sex marriages performed outside of the district, but it was hardly an all out war. Much of the opposition came from the religious community: as many as 100 black ministers signed a petition opposing the measure. However, there is a newly formed D.C. Clergy United for Marriage Equality is comprised of about 200 clergy members who support same-sex marriage – twice the number of ministers who signed the petition opposing it. The opposition simply isn’t as strong as people tend to expect. It wasn’t enough to stop the bill from being introduced, and it hasn’t been strong enough to overturn it. Playing the race card to excuse Baltimore’s (and Maryland’s) lack of progress simply isn’t sufficient – the racial tension in D.C.’s politics runs just as deep as it does in Baltimore.
The truth is that Maryland advocates primarily have themselves to blame. The majority of our City Council, along with that state government, is uncomfortable and misinformed when it comes to same-sex rights. They are not going to be take initiative with gay rights measures, and we don’t have a single strong advocacy group to hold them to their obligation to support these rights. It’s not that we lack organizations – Baltimore is home to The R Group (a professional gay and lesbian group), the Maryland Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce (which focuses on the business community), the Maryland Stonewall Democrats (a political action group that supports candidates/elected officials who support gay rights), and Equality Maryland (a group that promotes marriage equality). We have an LGBT community center (the GLCCB) and a number of social and support organizations. The problem is that the presence of so many organizations, all of which are essentially fighting for the same thing, separates gay rights advocates into too many factions to get anything accomplished.
Out of all of these advocacy groups, the most effective establishment is the social organization Guerilla Gay Bar Baltimore(GGBB), simply because it unites so many people at each event. The basic premise is this: one night a month, the gay population ventures out of Baltimore’s unofficial gayborhood (Mount Vernon) to a pre-determined straight bar in some other area of the city. This organization has garnered more press, praise, and public attention than any other advocacy group. The sheer frequency of these events puts GGBB ahead of other advocacy groups. Many other organizations only have events listed as occurring every six months – a fatal flaw, since these events are the easiest way to involve people who have not made a career of advocacy. Furthermore, GGBB’s information is accessible – it is easier to find out where GGBB took place each month for the past year than it is to find information on any of Maryland’s gay right’s measures.
The punchline is this: if advocacy groups in Baltimore, or Maryland as a whole, want to achieve anything, they need more bodies working for a unified cause. If all of the social groups could actually organize themselves to fight for one thing at a time, they would be able to make the kind of progress we’re seeing in D.C. and a handful of other states. Without a grassroots movement, without some kind of action to get people talking, and without organizing the kind of activity that people will want to participate in, we’re going to be stuck in the same place for a very long time.
capacity earth beginning climate
December 2, 2009 3:07 am