Every Little Queer Vote Matters: Reflections On The Demise Of DOMA

"Oh my G-d, he's marrying another man!"

Now that Rahm Emanuel has gone off to work his magic on Chicago, it seems that everyone in the Obama White House has gone a little light in the loafers, as my Dad used to say.  Clinton-era palliatives to the right wing that beat back the gays, while Republicans reorganized to elect a president who would send our money and our jobs abroad, are dropping like flies. First the military's Don't Ask, Don't Tell received a timetable for withdrawal, and yesterday Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the Department of Justice will not defend the Defense of Marriage Act because it is unconstitutional.

In both cases, the Obama administration is holding out an olive branch to liberals who have been in an impatient "show me" mood.  But looked at another way, one of the things we know about conservatives is that they are increasingly less persuaded, as a group, in the moral issues that right-wing strategists use to obscure other fiscal and political agendas.  Abortion is probably the one exception to this, and I can't help but wonder whether the Republican attack on Planned Parenthood -- in many communities the only place where uninsured women of low and middle income brackets have access to birth control, breast cancer screening and gynecological care -- isn't going to come back to bite them in the a$$.

What is interesting to me, looking at a longer historical trajectory, is that Obama's tactics in this regard are quite similar to those used by Jimmy Carter in the first two years of his administration. In 1977, the National Gay Task Force (NGTF)* sent a negotiating team of six men and six women to the White House to negotiate a repeal of an Eisenhower-era ban on gays in government.  The group included luminaries of the left like peace activist and radical lesbian feminist Charlotte Bunch, and was backed by former ACLU Sexual Privacy Project attorney Marilyn Haft, who had gone to work in the Carter administration.

Looking at the archival record, which I have recently for an article that will come out in the Journal of Policy History, you can see two things.  One is that Carter's aides wanted nothing to do with gays, and could have gotten away with that.  Unlike feminists, while GLBT Democrats were organized, they had not yet had a structural impact on the party at the national level.  Carter, however, was persuaded that the moral argument against homosexuality did not preclude a human rights argument on behalf of gays who were excluded from access to many citizenship rights because they were homosexuals.  While the NGTF pressed throughout the administration for the President to take a public stand on gay human rights through an executive order that banned discrimination (legislation originally written by Representatives Ed Koch and Bella Abzug in 1972 is still languishing somewhere on the island of Untouchable Bills), what Carter chose to do was simply stand back and allow the NGTF to persuade Cabinet-level agencies to allow homosexuals to grieve discrimination just like all other citizens were entitled to do.

In this way, a great many barriers to employment fell by eliminating the category of sexual orientation as justification for special discrimination in the federal realm.  This had ramifications beyond government employment, since agencies like the FCC and the Treasury had great power to hear, or not hear, complaints about discrimination that shaped critical areas of American cultural and economic life. That said, the administration did not force agencies to conform to this model, which left the military and the national security apparatus largely untouched. 

Indeed, the similarities between Obama's policies and Carter's are more dramatic the harder you look. Few people not on a GLBT listserve of some kind probably noticed that an out transwoman, Amanda Simpson, was appointed to the Commerce Department in 2010, or that six months later, the State Department lifted the requirement that transpeople have surgery to alter their gender on their passports.  This latter move is incredibly important for the freedom of transfolk to cross borders (and incidentally, to consume airfares and whatnot), but it lifts one form of discrimination while leaving the principle in place that gender identity itself is a border that ought to be complicated and difficult to cross.

Two observations, in closing.  White House statements that Obama's personal views in this matter are separate from his presidential responsibilities demonstrate how far we have not come in the last forty years and how far we have come in the last twenty.  That a president cannot simply come out and say all forms of discrimination, even discrimination against people who disgust you personally, is wrong, demonstrates how the Age of Reagan permanently reshaped political discourse.  And yet, the way that this has happened, much as many mainstream GLBT people would like to be embraced by the President, potentially begins a turn away from neoliberal ideologies that have collapsed the public and private realms since 1988.  A neoliberal himself, Obama has nevertheless re-established some clarity between the realm of personal views and the realm of constitutional, public responsibility has, I  would argue, far broader ramifications for developing the concept of good government than we can perceive around this one issue.  But he is doing so in a way that also sets limits to what can be accomplished, since it stops short of an affirmative statement and affirmative actions that ban all forms of discrimination against GLBT people.

Cross posted at Cliopatria.
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NGTF became the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force in the mid-1980s, and now often colloquially refers to itself as "The Task Force."

It Gets Worse: Queer People "Volunteer" To Help To Ease The Tax Burden For Straight Families

Remember in my last post when I said it doesn't always get better?  A little bird down the street at Yale --erp, I mean, Oligarch University twigged me last week to a payroll error, because of which 61 employees will see a paycheck reduction of 33% or more for January and the subsequent two months.  Right before winter break, LGBT employees who had taken advantage of Connecticut's new freedom to gay marry received a letter telling them of a payroll error:  the university had ceased withholding taxes on the benefits received for domestic partners who had become spouses under state law -- but not federal law.  The upshot, for those of you who suffer temporary black out when taxes are mentioned, gay married people get to pay two years of taxes in one.

Homos are just more patriotic, that's all.  Photo Credit.

In many ways, this falls under the category of discriminatory behavior that allows universities to perform budget trimming immoral acts because they are perfectly legal, while insisting that it is not they who discriminate.  For those of you not familiar with what those of us who pay it call "the gay tax," homofolk whose marriages are not recognized under federal law pay federal taxes on benefits that are untaxable for  heterofolk, resulting in thousands of dollars of penalties that gay people pay.  According to Tara Bernard at the New York Times (January 11 2011):

A programming error failed to withhold income for taxes owed on the value of domestic partner health coverage....the value of those benefits are taxable (for nondependent partners) by the federal government. But in states like Connecticut, same-sex married couples are treated the same as opposite-sex married couples, and those benefits are not taxable on their state income tax returns.


“Unfortunately, the payroll system inadvertently treated those benefits as nontaxable for Connecticut and federal purposes for the entire calendar year of 2010,” said a letter, dated Dec. 22, from Yale’s payroll department to employees with same-sex partners who were affected by the error. To correct the error, the university went on to say, it would pay the tax and deduct the amount it paid from employees’ paychecks — in equal amounts over the first three months of 2011.


The university, which has extended health insurance to its same-sex employees’ domestic partners since 1994, typically withholds those taxes from employees’ paychecks over the course of the year. But due to the programming error, employees will be responsible for paying the taxes for both years in 2011.

Oligarch has offered "a more flexible repayment schedule" in the event that losing a third or more of a person's salary causes them any hardship. Gosh, do ya think? But honestly, you know what causes a hardship?  Being paid less for doing the same job than straight people are.  As Bernard pointed out last December, a provision of the federal health care bill that would have eliminated this tax on health benefits was dropped from the final legislation.  A very small number of employers (Google, Cisco and the Gates Foundation) reimburse employees for the cost of this discriminatory tax, a practice called "grossing up." Very few institutions of higher ed follow this practice (Syracuse is one -- commenters are invited to name names), and it is particularly shameful that one as well-endowed as Oligarch does not.

The university has received public criticism from the Human Rights Campaign; you can go here to sign a petition to tell Yale how stupid they are on this issue.  But while you are at it, if you are an academic, tell your own university about the anti-gay discrimination that helps them pay for essentials like football, keeping the cost of Alumni/ae weekends low, Presidential salaries in the millions and giving iPods to every entering freshman.  Check out the schools you graduated from, and let them know how you feel about a practice that writes discrimination into the law and violates the equal protection clause of the Constitution. Hey, I've got an idea, Yale Law profs:  how about filing a big, fat civil rights suit on behalf of your colleagues?

Department of Archives: GLAD Papers Go To Yale, Mitch McConnell Comes Out

Ssssh!  Don't let John Boehner know!

That's Gay & Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, queer history fans.  And Mitch McConnell didn't really come out, but doesn't the action figure at right look a lot like Mitch McConnell in a dress?  And wouldn't it be cool if he did come out, and then helped to get rid of Don't Ask, Don't Tell?

OK, dream on.  And when I dream, I dream of archives. In case you don't know why the GLAD archive is important, read on from this press release received on the Radical desk top today:

GLAD is the New England litigation organization whose precedent-setting legal victories include bringing marriage equality to Massachusetts in 2004 and Connecticut in 2008.

Covering all the major social changes and legal developments in contemporary LGBT history – from the HIV epidemic to marriage equality, from transgender rights to the “gayby boom,” GLAD’s records include correspondence, legal documents, research materials, photographs, meeting minutes, reports, publications, press releases, and financial records. The materials reveal the fascinating “backstory” to many of GLAD’s groundbreaking lawsuits – including early litigation that secured the right of a gay Rhode Island high school student to bring his boyfriend to the prom, the Supreme Court victory holding that people with HIV are protected from discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act, the suit that led to Vermont’s historic civil union law, and the marriage equality wins in Massachusetts and Connecticut.

The materials will be available in Manuscripts and Archives in Sterling Memorial Library in New Haven.  The Yale University Library has one of the country’s most important research collections in LGBT history and the history of sexuality, including the records of Love Makes A Family; nineteenth-century diaries documenting same-sex intimacy; the papers of Harvey Fierstein, Gertrude Stein, Glenway Westcott, Larry Kramer, David Mixner, and numerous other lesbian and gay writers, artists, and activists; and one of the largest collections in the world of homosexual periodicals published before the gay liberation era of the 1970s.

“As an organization that has brought about significant shifts in the way LGBT people are treated under the law, by the government and by society as a whole, GLAD’s records will be an invaluable source for scholars, historians, civil rights advocates and students,” said Christine Weideman, Sterling Memorial Library’s Director of Manuscripts and Archives. “We’re grateful to be entrusted with preserving this vital part of history.”

“GLAD was founded in response to a series of anti-gay government actions in Boston in 1977-1978, including a police sting operation at the Boston Public Library.  That our records will now be archived at Yale’s world-renowned research library is a marker of how far the LGBT community has progressed over the last three decades,” said Lee Swislow, GLAD’s Executive Director. “We are honored to have played a part in that progress just as we are honored that Yale will ensure that the record of our work is preserved for the benefit of future generations.”

“These papers will be of immense value to historians and other scholars,” said George Chauncey, Professor of History and co-director of the Yale Research Initiative on the History of Sexualities. “GLAD’s litigation has played a leading role in mitigating the widespread discrimination faced by LGBT people, and their remarkable records will give scholars and the public a much better understanding of both the extent of that discrimination and the legal and political strategies that have challenged it.”

Records designated by GLAD as open to research will be available in early 2011.

I can just hear your mother now.  "First I had to stop using the word 'gay,' and now I have to stop....."

In Case You Were Wondering: The Financial Penalties For Being Unmarried

Stigma or Pride?  Shall the Congress or the Courts Decide?

Despite the fact that I would include myself in the category of people who are utterly unmoved by the romance of gay marriage (except when I am softened by pictures of people who are moved by it), I occasionally feel pissed off about structural discrimination that awards bonuses to people who can and do marry.

Today I opened a letter from TIAA-CREF that contains an "update" to my "original contract...which states that same-sex marriages aren't recognized under current federal tax law" because of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).  Passed in 1996, DOMA defines marriage as a legal contract that can only be entered into by one man and one woman, and was declared unconstitutional by a federal district court last July.  It was signed into law by William Jefferson Clinton, for which (along with welfare reform and NAFTA) he will roast in the hell that hypocrites go to forever, regardless of how many other good works they perform.

The point of this form is that, should I predecease her, my partner will inherit my retirement account as if she were a stranger or a casual friend:  this goes for other federal inheritance laws designed to protect the common property of married folk.  Were I to perish tomorrow, we would have lived together in a committed fashion for over a quarter century, a state in which even the most troubled and fractious heterosexual couple might claim to be wed under common law.  What are the other financial penalties for being partnered but unmarried in the eyes of the federal government?

• If you are gay-married under state law, you get to file two separate tax returns, which costs more.
• If you have the good luck to have domestic partner benefits, or live in a state where you can gay-marry, you have to pay federal taxes on the amount of money kicked in by the university on behalf of your spouse as if it were income.
• Even if you are gay-married, you cannot create a MERA (an instrument that permits an individual to reserve pre-tax dollars for the many medical expenses not covered by insurance) for both you and your partner, only yourself.
• If your gay spouse does not have an income, you cannot count hir as a dependent and get a tax deduction.
• Your gay spouse does not have access to any federal pension to which s/he might otherwise be entitled were s/he an opposite-sex spouse.

So all you straight married people out there who do get these things?  You are getting a big, fat, frakking bonus, and I would be interested in knowing what it is you do for our Republic to deserve it.  Or let me know what anyone in a state-sanctioned marriage would do to deserve all of these tax breaks:  if DOMA were rescinded tomorrow, and Partner and I continued living as we do but with a marriage license from the state of Connecticut, why would that federal magic trick entitle us to the extra $$?

Although I am quite sure that everyone who has a TIAA-CREF account received this letter, the vast majority of my heterosexual colleagues will throw it in the round file without a thought. To them, these financial privileges are invisible -- many, in fact, believe that they deserve them, even though they can't precisely say why when asked. For me, however, this letter is a particularly keen reminder of our  current state of sexual apartheid, and I think I will post it on my office door.

She'll Always Be A Player On The Ballfield Of My Heart: Tenured Radical And Historiann Wrap Up Their Conversation About The Professor

This is the Part III, and the conclusion, of a discussion between Tenured Radical and Historiann of Terry Castle's "The Professor and Other Writings" (HarperCollins, 2010 -- if you are new to the party, you may wish to begin with Part I.) Yesterday, at Historiann, we discussed the themes of desire and longing that suffuse Castle's narrative about her emergence as an intellectual who has to cross class lines to chart her own path to become an adult, a feminist, a lesbian, an artist, and a deeply original and critical thinker.

Today's post consists of a single exchange in which we historicize the role of suffering in this story. We end with the question of whether, in a day and age in which sexual relations between students and teachers are widely perceived as harmful (and often proscribed by universities), whether the suffering of graduate students has been ameliorated, or it has just shifted to other realms of power, as graduate students continue to struggle to get into the "club."

Tenured Radical: I want to come back to the question of whether brilliance and suffering go together, which is a critical theme of the Art Pepper essay that we both loved. The way Terry Castle tells the story of her affair with the Professor, as you suggested yesterday Historiann, is a dramatic tour de force. But another way of summing up what we discussed, and what compels me, is the portrait of a young person who was so tightly wound and suffused with class anxiety, but also had access to depths of courage that are quite rare. What I wonder is, had she continued down the road she was on, might she have had a nervous breakdown anyway? On a certain level it was a mercy that it was a broken heart, rather than the anxious scholarly habits of her youth, that drove Castle into therapy and a lifetime of self-reflection. We are talking about someone who read all the books for a course before the semester began; and memorized, word for word, the essay she would write for a proctored exam. Something had to give -- or, arguably, maybe nothing would have given, and she would have ended up being a frightened, uptight, conventional little plodder instead of the fabulous Terry Castle.

But to shift gears slightly, I would like to expand the context for The Professor's predatory eroticism for our readers, and Castle's vulnerability to it. One of the things I love about this difficult essay is that Castle evokes the excitement and the contradictions of a 1970s lesbian feminist world. Lots of different things were going on sexually then (a former Zenith professor alludes in her memoir to what I have been told were rampant faculty affairs with undergraduates) and everyone queer was half in and half out of the closet. This is why Castle begins with a reflection on Alix Dobkin's music, which was coy and coded but to young lesbians seemed to really be about sex. It is also why, even though Castle frames the whole genre of "wimmin's music" as deeply dorky by today's standards (musical, feminist or lesbian), she bridles when her partner, Blakey (who came out a decade later), joins her in mocking it. Not so veiled references to masturbation in the lyrics, paeans to gym teachers, using the word "lesbian" over and over in a song -- it was a big deal back then. Someone who came out in the age of ACT-UP and Babeland might find that impossible to understand or misperceive the music as only dorky. One of the moments when I howled with laughter was when Castle did a textual analysis of Dobkin's "The Woman In Your Life," ending it with the command: "Ladies, start your labia!" (159)

But of course Dobkin, Meg Christian, Cris Williamson and that crowd were the soft side of semi-closeted lesbian life which, as Castle pointed out, offered little introduction to a pre-feminist, pre-Stonewall psychopath like The Professor. The coyness and messages to an "in crowd" in these songs also offered little in the way of a road map to becoming an actual lesbian: i.e., to having actual sex with actual women. Castle also emphasizes that much of what was more broadly available about lesbianism (outside of incredibly dense Marxist tracts) was still about women coming to a pathological, lonely and disgraced end (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Killing of Sister George.) Part of what I identify with most strongly in this essay is how difficult it was to actually have sex, and the things one might overlook to get sex -- as Castle did when she pursued an affair with The Professor despite the metaphorical road signs that said: "No!" This essay evokes painful memories of the fumbling, the oblique approaches, the meetings accidentally on purpose, and the sitting for hours smoking weed, trying to decide whether she had meant to bump my foot or was she just reaching for the cigarettes and oh $hit I blew it again. And frankly, although feminism provided a hot atmosphere for sex, the endless conversation about whether all wimmin ought to be lesbians on principle got in the way of figuring out who really wanted to and who didn't.

Because of this, I think Castle makes a great move when she raises the question of who was responsible for what in an affair that would now fit squarely in the category of sexual harassment. Now a middle-aged professor herself with a younger and clearly very self-sufficient lover, Castle wants to better understand her own agency in this affair, "just what it was about her that drew me to her: what peculiar pathos she evinced, and why I was so vulnerable to it." (201)

As you note, Historiann, The Professor is an excellent portrait "of the kind of professor that compulsively sleeps with students." It's also an excellent portrait of an academic atmosphere where women were provisional members of the club, something that had all sorts of deforming consequences. Including myself in this generation of aspiring female intellectuals, I would say that lots of us in the 1970s had our first big love affair with a woman who was, for whatever reason, unavailable, and who appeared to be holding the door open to a life that still admitted a precious few women. What Castle evokes so movingly in this essay is that she was willing to trade so much to be loved and admired. Although she was too naive to see that the affair she wanted was really a "horror movie" (that was a great comparison you made), the affair also freed her to be someone The Professor never could be: a lesbian intellectual.

What follows, I think, is that to become a successful professor is to necessarily become an object of desire. It is a burden and a great responsibility. The evening Castle and The Professor meet, this insecure, lonely graduate student experiences for the first time what it might mean to be an object of desire herself. "[The] Professor's eyes lit up with pleasure," Castle writes; "she kept a light sardonic gaze trained on me for most of the evening." (236) Castle is first welcomed as a guest into the beautiful, cultured world that can be hers as an academic when she sees The Professor's home. That moment really got me, because Castle is being introduced to the life she wants and will have, but she's really going to pay to get it.

I suppose I would link this theme in the essay to a bigger theme in the blogosphere that you and I have commented on: graduate students continue to pay heavily to get into the club, not necessarily with sex (although some do), but emotionally and financially. What is kind of tawdry about the world we live in today, one that is so deeply censorious in theory about sexual harassment (and not always in practice) is that graduate students are tested in such unromantic ways. They rarely have to reach deep inside to dredge out what remains of their self-esteem after a high-drama failed love affair. Instead, the academic marketplace and the profession beckons them, uses them, kicks them out with as little explanation as The Professor deigned to give her conquests ("there were so many excellent candidates -- it was really a matter of field"), or reduces them to unheroic proletarianized labor.

The Professor suing one of her former student-lovers for a sum of money she could have perfectly well afforded to give her strikes me as a parallel to contingent faculty paying back graduate school debt on meagre adjunct salaries.

Historiann: Good point. (And of all The Professor's cruelties, that one really frosted the cookie for me. Unbelievable! It makes one wonder about the depths of humiliation and fear of intimacy that must have been at the root of The Professor's compulsive seductions and manipulations.)

However, individual professors are personally responsible for seducing students. They may be complicit in a broken system, but professors are not personally responsible for the current state of the academic job market their students will face. Where I see the parallel here is in the willingness of the students to be seduced and taken advantage of. This goes back to what you called "the logic and erotic appeal of a secret affair," and the denial you note. It's not just that "she wouldn't lie to me," but also when faced either with a sex life that's an exploitative cliche or a life as a permatemp, it's a consoling belief in the face of the facts that "it won't happen to me. I'll be the exception. I will be loved/employed someday." This kind of denial may be necessary not just in some romantic entanglements, but also in the minds of people who want to pursue an academic career. We're all Clarissa, friends.

This returns us to a theme we discussed earlier--the working-class girl who makes it to Stanford. "The Professor" is fascinating because it makes her survival of her disastrous first Big Love appear to be a bigger triumph than her academic career. (Maybe that's the way it feels to her, and to many of us who made it to employment and tenure.) I still maintain--Pollyanna that I am!--that cruelty, abuse and exploitation aren't necessary either in romance or in our work lives. I really don't think it makes us better people or better at our jobs. But, as Samuel Richardson showed us centuries ago in Castle's second-favorite book of all time, it sure makes for a hell of a story.

Tenured Radical: It sure does. Historiann, I just want to leave our readers with a YouTube video that contains a live recording of Meg Christian singing "Ode To A Gym Teacher" in 1974 at the Full Moon Coffee House in San Francisco (a more recent, live recording of Christian that can't be embedded can be seen here.) But in a way this one is better, because it was put together by a fan who used a pastiche of "wimmin's music" souvenirs from the 1970s for the visual portion, something which Terry Castle the Visual Artist will appreciate, I think.

Extra! Extra! It's Not Only Healthy To Be Born To A Lesbian Couple, It's Better than Healthy

In case you have been living under a rock, the big news this week in Gaylesboland is that a federal judge in Massachusetts (otherwise known as the San Francisco of the East) has ruled that the Defense of Marriage Act violates the right of the states to regulate marriage. The second biggest news is that the children of lesbian couples are not only as successful as the children of straight people -- they are more successful! Whatever that means. According to Time magazine, a longitudinal study out of UC-San Francisco, published in the journal Pediatrics,

found that children raised by lesbian mothers — whether the mother was partnered or single — scored very similarly to children raised by heterosexual parents on measures of development and social behavior. These findings were expected, the authors said; however, they were surprised to discover that children in lesbian homes scored higher than kids in straight families on some psychological measures of self-esteem and confidence, did better academically and were less likely to have behavioral problems, such as rule-breaking and aggression.

According to one of the lead researchers, Nanette Gartrelle, although 41% of children reported the teasing at school that is supposed to persuade gay and lesbian people not to parent (for the sake of the children), the home environments in lesbian households make up for it with higher levels of nurturing and by making their children "a priority." The outcomes do not change for children whose two mothers separate (lesbians split up at about the same rate as straight people, which is 43% within 15 years, although this is harder to track since in most states same-sex couples have no right to marry or divorce.)

Are the children of lesbians better adjusted because the parents are all women? Probably not, because all of our mothers were women at some point. Is it because there are no men in the children's lives? Also probably not: all the lesbian moms I know (particularly those with sons, which is about 90% of 'em) are super-fanatical about bringing daddy-types into the picture lest Junior spend his whole life without ever meeting another penis or learning to urinate mannishly. More likely lesbians treat their children better because if you are a lesbian, you really have to want children a lot, and you really plan, and you have to put up with a lot of crap from the law to actually get and keep them. You also need a lot of money, and although children raised with money are not automatically successful, it sure greases the wheels: money + making child rearing a priority is one sure-fire recipe for success. This means, of course, that gay men are probably raising children who are just fanatically successful, since they have to have even more money to get children in the first place by adoption or surrogacy, and have to be highly educated besides to navigate the homophobic legal hoops they must jump through.

It also means that the whole idea that we should have gay marriage because it's better for the children in lesbian relationships is a lot of hooey. The children in this study were raised by committed and unmarried lesbians, married as they surely might have been in their hearts.

In case you want a little fictionalized peek at lesbian life with children, the summer's hot movie for the gay and gay-friendly moving goer will be Lisa Cholodenko's The Kid's Are All Right: read the review by A.O. Scott here. Annette Bening and Julianne Moore as lesbians? I'm lovin' it, and it's rumored that all the babies in that relationship are named Oscar.

What, Exactly, Is The Gay Agenda? And What Part Should Repeal Of The Defense of Marriage Act Play In It?

I had missed it that the federal Department of Justice (DoJ) had filed a brief supporting the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DoMA) until my Facebook friends went berserk over it on Friday. DoMA, for those of you who have been living under a rock, withholds federal recognition from any marriage contract not enacted between a man and a woman (read Jennifer Finney Boylan here on the application of that idea to transpeople), and licenses states to void gay marriages contracted in other states that are illegal under their own laws.

Many queers see Obama backpedaling on GLBT issues, and point to a campaign statement where he explicitly objected to the provisions of DoMA. I suppose it isn't worth it it to point out that Attorney General Eric Holder is not the President: he is only the President's right hand. My capacity for outrage is currently taken up with other things, such as: why paying bonuses to financial industry executives represents a crucial commitment to the sanctity of contracts, but paying benefits that were promised to retired auto workers is not. Or why Congress is setting its hair on fire over auto dealers losing their livelihoods, but seems unconcerned with the reverberating effects of auto workers losing theirs. I do have some room for other topics, however, and it seems clear that Miss Mary Obama needs to get his s***t together and communicate his good will to queers in a more concrete way than he has to date. I would add that queer people may need to pull themselves together too, as my buddy Bear Left is urging. "Don't Moan, Organize!" he advises. And yet, Bear, as you point out in the post, gays and lesbians are very organized.

I guess my question is this: is the brief really an outrage, except in the realm of symbolic politics where every queer victory is one step closer to Utopia, and every loss another step towards the Gulag? The Daily Kos has a selection of responses to the government's position on DoMA, and on the brief's effect on Obama's relationship to queer voters. The overall sentiment is that seems to be here that Obama had a chance to weigh in on the side of gay marriage, and not only did he fail to do so, but he weighed in on behalf of the status quo.

But this may be a good thing, because the status quo is legally quite fragile. DoMa has created fertile ground for a crushing wave of lawsuits, particularly now that some states have legalized gay marriage. One attorney I consulted in Connecticut thinks there will be major litigation under the commerce clause (click here and look under "Section 8, Powers of Congress"), as married couples working for national corporations are transferred to states that do not support, or that explicitly prohibit, their marriages or any benefits derived from them. These people will sue in federal court for access to the employment benefits they were entitled to but are then denied in state #2, even though they work for the same company. And they will win.

In this vein, check out law prof Nan D. Hunter over at Hunter For Justice. A former Clinton appointee, she has been working on these things for a long time, and infers that we are seeing the Obama administration play out a political game ultimately aimed at overturning DoMA in Congress. Congress will see a tsunami of litigation bearing down on them, she argues, and act to avert it by voiding their own stupid legislation. She also suggests that the arguments made by the DoJ in last week's brief are relatively superficial, sending a subtler message than the pro-marriage folks are able to hear right now in the wave of frustration and rage over the Prop 8 decision in California. A feeble case for restricting marriage was certainly the strategy in Connecticut, according to a member of the State Supreme Court who voted with the majority and who I had dinner with after the decision was published. Attorney General Richard Blumenthal did what he was supposed to do, which was to defend the constitutionality of the marriage law, but let's just say that he and his team didn't produce the kind of compelling brief we have come to expect from them in other matters, nor did "Swinging" Dick Blumenthal himself appear to argue for the state.

What are the advantages of sending DoMA back to Congress rather than steering multiple cases through the courts? Well, it might be faster, for one thing. Another is that social engineering from the bench has become a huge source of political conflict in this country, and the opposition it engenders can be crippling to a progressive agenda. Every piece of legislation should meet a rigorous constitutional test prior to being enacted, and the enactment of social change through federal legislation makes progressive change part of a democratic process that is more likely to produce consensus after the fact (unless, of course, you are a follower of John C. Calhoun's theory of concurrent majority.)

There is now a long history of judicial interventions that have overturned discriminatory laws, and very few of them have had the impact that progressives have hoped, or that has been achieved by say, the Wagner Act, the 1965 Civil Rights Act, or Title IX. Two failures of what conservatives call "legislating from the bench" are prominent, in my view: school desegregation and abortion. Half a century after Brown v. Board of Education (1954), our nation's schools are as (or more) segregated than they ever have been, and our private universities call themselves "diverse" when 5-10% of the entering class is African-American, and 20% are "students of color." Kevin Kruse's 2005 White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism demonstrates how whites in Atlanta successfully used what laws and institutions were available to them to re-segregate the geography and public institutions of their city, including its schools. Furthermore, court-ordered busing, as a remedy to residential segregation, has been a disaster, even though a great many people my age, black and white, benefited from it enormously.

And of course, as I have discussed recently here and here, the struggle to preserve abortion rights in the United States has become a principle rallying point for conservatives, and a source of endless litigation, during which women's reproductive freedoms have narrowed dramatically as "contraception" and "abortion" have become categorically merged by conservatives, religious extremists and the family values crowd. Thirty-five years after Roe v. Wade (1973), a woman's constitutional right to act on a private consultation with her physician by not bringing a pregnancy to term has been devastated in multiple ways, and corrupted the process of vetting judicial appointments by allowing one issue to dominate over others.

I've come a long way toward being sympathetic to the desire for gay marriage, but I continue to believe that it has consumed vast resources that might have been devoted to achieving universal access to: decent housing; good schools committed to educating citizens that are safe for queer kids; accessible higher education; universal health insurance; non-discrimination in assigning pension, death and federal retirement benefits; equality in adoption laws; equality under the law for women and children; ending discrimination in family court; full funding for public health outreach and research into communicable diseases; universal day care; immigration reform; disability rights; pay equity, a living wage and anti-poverty legislation. Citizens have a fundamental right to these things, whether they are married or not. As one of my favorite organizations, Queers for Economic Justice has pointed out on multiple occasions, the reason gay marriage is perceived as a middle class issue is because it is a middle class issue. Poor people have no property or rights to convey through marriage, nor do they have to worry about visiting someone in the hospital, because they can't get into one anyway. And why does "Don't ask, don't tell" not muster the emotional outpourings that gay marriage campaigns do? Because, as Janet Halley pointed out in Don't: A Readers Guide to the Military's Anti-Gay Policy, educated middle-class queers either don't approve of war, or they don't need to sign up for military service to get access to human rights that are currently privileges in the United States, and that they can find a way to purchase. In queer academic circles, at least, while marriage is the gay agenda everyone loves to hate, military service is really off the radar. In other words, "Don't Ask, Don't Tell (Don't Care!)"

If the Obama administration is not getting sucked into an eight-year struggle over DoMA that saps energy from their other social initiatives, then I would say that they have already learned the lessons queers need to learn: that there are some critical things that support a dignified life, and the right to marry is at the bottom of that list. I say this knowing how much people want it, and even having felt the warm fuzzies as it has passed, state by state. But that said, my gay agenda is to live in a country where marriage is purely a choice that people make out of sentiment, but one that conveys no material privileges whatsoever.

Should Have Taken The Car (And Other Radical Notes On Public Policy and Family Values)

In case you were about to get to work this morning, hold your horses. Megan Stack at The Huffington Post gives us a sneak preview of the latest episode in Wasilla's Bristolgate scandal. In the upcoming GQ, hunkalicious high school dropout Levi Johnston reveals that on multiple occasions Todd Palin offered to give Bristol a car if she would break up with him.

Definitely should have taken the car, Bristol. Of course, maybe she figured that if she didn't use birth control, and did have a baby, Todd and Sarah would have to give her a car anyway to take the baby to Baby Swim and Well Baby and Baby Baby. Or that Sarah would forget that it was Bristol's baby, and maybe think it was just another baby she had delivered herself by mistake on a fund-raising trip. Then Bristol would have had both Levi and the car. Talk about thinking ahead!

But back to poor, wounded Levi, who is now said to be interested in writing a book (and you tenure-track faculty think writing a book is so hard! Pish-tosh.) In an earlier interview, shortly after the Johnston-Palin "engagement" was broken, Johnston noted that the "snobby" Palins never believed that he was good enough for their daughter. He also said the greatest misconception about him and his family is that they are "white trash." Now this is not a phrase I would ever use, but I am with the most famous baby daddy in America on this one. He is definitely good enough for Bristol who, if you ask me, is a bit of a fixer-upper herself, and doesn't clean up half as good as he does. And if the Palins think Levi is white trash, who do they exactly think they are? Royalty? I ask you.

I bet if Todd had offered Levi the car he would have taken it.

The latest revelations from steamy Wasilla join the other family values story of the week -- no, not the first Latina to overcome a hard scrabble childhood and be nominated to the Supreme Court, you silly goose! -- but the California Supreme Court ruling to:

a) Uphold Proposition 8; and
b) Allow all gay marriages that occurred before Prop 8 to remain valid.

Hunh? So what this means is that marriage, in California, is only legal between a man and a woman, except when two men (or say, two women) get married in a limbo period between the State Supreme Court deciding that they have full civil rights and the wise people of California deciding that they do not have civil rights. Now, of course, the Prop 8 folks are gearing themselves up to enforce the dissolution of those marriages that remain by another act of wholesome, popular will that will probably also be funded by the Mormon Church. I mean, c'mon. Shouldn't they busy themselves with ending the slaughter of innocent fetuses or something? Or trying to persuade teenagers that using condoms is a fool's game? Or trying to buff up Sarah Palin's image so that she can be the Barry Goldwater of 2012? Get a life, people.

California is clearly digging itself into a very deep legal hole here. My question is, what happens when a gay couple who have married in Iowa move to San Francisco, say, tomorrow? Are they still married or not? Tune in next month as conservatives create more litigation than you can possibly imagine about something that matters less to the economic or political future of this country than you can possibly imagine.

My idea is this: take a leaf out of Todd Palin's book. With two major car companies going through bankruptcy right now, I think California might want to solve this problem by buying a lot of cars and offering them to gay and lesbian people if they promise not to get married. Or buying cars for family values activists if they promise to lay off gay and lesbian people who want to get married. Or both.

How's that for solving two difficult policy problems at one stroke? Why the Obama administration does not hire me is, frankly, a mystery.

Hello, American Historical Association: My Name Is The Tenured Radical And I Am Here To Recruit You

So today I am home from the American Historical Association Annual Meeting, and instead of re-reading job candidate files, I am thinking about transgender activist Sylvia Rae Rivera, who is pictured on the left (as she always was.) I am thinking about San Francisco organizer Harvey Milk, pictured below, the first openly gay man to be elected to public office and the person from whom I have ripped off my title. As those who have seen the new Gus Van Sant movie Milk or read Randy Shilts's book The Mayor of Castro Street know, the signature opening line of Harvey's political speeches played on the stereotype of predatory criminal queers obsessed with "recruiting" the young into their "lifestyle." He would hop up on whatever platform was available and screech, "My name is Harvey Milk, and I am here to recruit you!"

Thanks to a commenter, one of my first reads today (after the New York Times) was this post by Scott Jaschik at Inside Higher Ed, reporting on the failed resolution at the AHA business meeting that sought to move next year's conference from the Manchester Grand Hyatt in San Diego. The hotel is owned by Doug Manchester, a financial backer of the Proposition Eight campaign that successfully (for now) ended gay marriage in the state of California. Instead, a compromise resolution was passed that would create programming to address the issues at stake in Prop 8, averting the financial disaster that moving the conference would be. Note to allies who see this as a spineless outcome: the Organization of American Historians is still paying for a similar, politically well-intentioned and financially disastrous, decision in 2005.

According to Jaschik, "Arnita Jones, executive director of the AHA, said that under the contract with the hotel, the association would owe $534,000 for breaking the deal now. The association would also lose another $181,000 in lost discounts negotiated with the hotel for meeting room equipment and related services." Barbara Weinstein of New York University, a past president of the AHA, pointed out usefully that Doug Manchester gets our money whether we like it or not at this point (what she doesn't point out is that he also gets to re-sell the space), while opponents of the substitute resolution argue that no one should be forced to enter space owned by a homophobe (forgive me if I am too reductive in describing Mr. Manchester, but I'm one of those love the sin, hate the sinner types.) The AHA assures us it will go to great lengths to make sure that no one will have to be around homophobes against their will, which is admirable given that this is a real trick - and I don't mean trick in a good way! -- in southern California. The local arrangements committee will, we are told, provide alternative housing, and will move the job register and other essential services to an adjacent hotel.

Now let me say, with all the sympathy in the world for people whose marriages may be annulled by the success of Prop 8, I have a bone to pick with this strategy. I'm not even going to ask why, while millions of people lose their jobs and civilians are being slaughtered in Gaza (joining civilians from Afghanistan and Iraq in whatever afterlife they are destined for), and given the profound failure of mainstream gay and lesbian organizing to move forward a single civil issue since the 1970s, we are raising the future of gay marriage as a critical issue for the American Historical Association. I know why we are talking about gay marriage more generally -- even I, the relentlessly anti-marriage Radical, is so outraged by Prop 8 that I thought briefly about getting married in the good old Nutmeg State (where, unlike California, Republicans are often Democrats in sheep's clothing) on principle alone. But I do wonder if we who are members of of the GLBTQ Caucus That Dare Not Speak Its Name* ought to be asking questions about why some of our members, and our trusted allies, are responding in such a reactive way at this late date. Who didn't know who Doug Manchester was prior to Prop 8? In fact, if you are going to boycott conservatives, why go to San Diego, one of the most reactionary, racist cities in the United States, at all? Or the state of California? Or indeed, anywhere but Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont? Because basically what is being proposed is not a "Don't Buy Where You Can't Work" campaign -- a labor strategy that was directly tied to a Fordist logic of economic justice that workers should be permitted a standard of consumption and a standard of economic equity that were tied to each other -- but a "Don't Buy Where You Can't Marry" campaign. Which makes no sense, in my view. No sense at all. A boycott of the Manchester Grand Hyatt is just another feature of the peculiar, incorrect and unworkable logic of gay and lesbian statist politics: that all civil rights struggles, for all oppressed peoples, are simply an extension and translation of African American social justice struggles.

Furthermore, it isn't clear to me why what happened in California is more homophobic than what is happening in New York, where Governor David Paterson is not willing to move on gay marriage until after the next election. Or that Prop 8 and its supporters have created a more homophobic legal environment than what prevails in all fifty states and the District of Columbia, something Barack Obama has not announced any intention to change. All state and local gay marriage laws are effectively trumped by the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), passed and signed (by Bill Clinton, with one eye on the upcoming election) in September of 1996, that pretends to enshrine Biblical law in federal law. So why don't we protest this by moving the AHA central offices to Canada, where gay marriage is legal? And by the way -- the number of professional settings I have been in lately where white people ignorantly blame black voters for the outcome of Prop 8 (rather than the No on 8 organizers who bypassed communities of color almost entirely) is deeply disturbing. I think the current failures of mainstream gay and lesbian organizing, that routinely marginalizes queer of color, economic justice and trans issues to solidify the privileges of white and/or middle class folks deserves the attention of at least one panel in San Diego.

It's not that I don't share the outrage. Even though I oppose the regulation of intimacy and family formation by church and state, and the inequitable distribution of resources and privilege, that marriage constitutes, I would also agree that "the people," in all their bigotry and ignorance, do not get to decide what is and is not a civil and/or constitutional right. So I would like to propose an alternative for next year's AHA: I think we should go. I think queer folk and their allies should go to San Diego in unprecedented numbers. I think we should occupy Doug Manchester's hotel, and I think we should hold mock weddings in the lobby. I think we should pass out literature to his guests educating them on civil rights issues and their connections to queer citizenship. I think we should move our queer programming out of the meeting rooms and into the public spaces of the hotel -- the lobby, the restaurants, the shops.

In closing, I would like to reflect upon what I think was the most disturbing, and unnoticed, subtheme of Van Sant's film biography of Harvey Milk. The movie, that ends with Milk's assassination and the great long shot of peaceful, silent protesters in a candlelit march on City Hall (not the riots that followed the march), should move us to ask a question about what queers have achieved by moving into the political system. The answer is, I think, comparatively little, when it comes to altering the basic institutions that represent the ways all citizens' lives are shaped by the state. How we turn the attacks on citizenship -- which go far beyond limiting the rights of queer folk, my friends -- is not clear to me. But a good start for queer historians might be to go to San Diego in vast numbers and queer the convention, and queer that hotel, big time.

How about that, you big old homos?

*I say this because it just changed its name, but because I wasn't at the meeting, I can't tell you what it is. I can tell you that lifetime memberships in this organization are still available for the low, low price of $150.

(Cross posted at Cliopatria.)

A Queer Day in History: The Radical Celebrates Her Birthday By Revealing A Variety of Well-Known and Little-Known Facts About May 16

It is no coincidence that we wake up this morning and find that gay men and lesbians in the state of California have, once again, been permitted to marry legally, this time via a split decision of the California Supreme Court. This is an historic event that bitter, angry people at the grassroots in this odd western state hope to reverse by referendum, against mounting evidence that conservative heterosexuals in the United States care more about global warming, health insurance, the price of gasoline, and the failed war in Iraq than they care about Adam and Steve registering at "Tar-jay." One referendum activist I saw on the news last night was predicting that this movement would doom Obama in California, as conservative voters flooded to the polls to save the family.

Mary, please.

It is, however, a fact that May 16 is a truly magical day in the year for queer folk. For example, half a century ago today, on May 16, 1958, a baby was born in the hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. Her parents peered at her skeptically, observing not only her big mouth but the rather pronounced and nimble fingers on both hands that suggested she might have a future as a....typist?

"Let's call her -- Tenured," suggested the mother, recovering from an intense two hours of labor and not thinking clearly, since she had anticipated being childless for a few precious hours longer.

"You've hit it," said the proud father, who was not really listening, but wrote it down on the form for the birth certificate people anyway. He had arrived just in time from upstairs where he was attending to other, less important patients, to whom he was previously committed because of the Hippocratic Oath and whatnot. "But I want to also name her after my favorite Aunt, who oddly, has been living with my other favorite aunt, her widowed sister-in-law and a librarian, for the last thirty years." The parents mulled it over silently, recalling Favorite Maiden Aunt's Wellesley degree, her life as a social worker at the Catholic Worker settlement on the Lower East Side of New York, her friends who plunged into the battle for Republican Spain in the 1930's. "I've got it!" the father said triumphantly. "Tenured....Radical!"

And thus was the Tenured Radical born and named, almost four decades before computer technology would create the cultural niche that would make her famous. Sure, in nursery school, tiny children would say, "What's tenure?" and the Radical would respond gravely, "I have no idea, but I shall commit myself to rectifying injustices done in its name one day." That is, of course, another story for another day.

And this is but a single episode that marks May 16 as a queer holiday. Other events occurring on this queer day in history (hat tip) we might want to note are:

May 16, 1527, when Florence re-established itself as a Republic, having driven out the Medici for the second time, no less, along with their interior decorators, who kept insisting on Renaissance furnishings. The Medici were an extraordinarily queer family, whose periodic defeats only inspired them to greater feats of kitsch and camp. Among those who would begin to set the tone for gays and lesbians everywhere were Lorenzo the Magnificent, an avid art collector; Pope Clement the VII, who wore a dress and commissioned the Sistine Chapel from a girlie-man; and Catherine de Medici, the world's first successful domineering mother. She ruled through her sons Charles IX and Henry III of France, and was responsible for the St. Bartholomew's massacre in 1572, a large scale slaughter of ill-dressed Protestants with whom the French and the Italians had collectively and utterly lost patience.

On May 16, 1770, 14 year-old Marie Antoinette married the future King of France, who was fifteen and several years from being able to consummate the marriage. Needless to say, the Dauphine was mightily distressed. Although the act was finally accomplished, Louis never really took much of an interest in his wife or the French people, preferring the company of scientists instead. Soon Antoinette's attention turned to big hair (pioneering what would later become the "beehive hairdo,") decorating, and her ladies-in-waiting, particularly the princesse de Lamballe and the duchesse de Polignac. Marie Antoinette became, after her head was removed from her shoulders in an effort to stem her overreliance on credit cards, a great heroine for nineteenth century women who loved women but who had not been fully educated by sexologists to call themselves "lesbians."

On May 16, during the 1822 Greek War of Independence, the Turks captured the Greek town of Souli, and having read Homer, demanded that the Greeks become their boyfriends. The Greeks happily complied, as the Turks were so big and strong. Hence the phrase that allows queer people to respond to accusations of unnatural behaviour by saying pointedly, "What about the Greeks?" Anything Greek is a queer holiday for these and other reasons: if you don't understand this, read the collected works of Mary Renault (who was, by the way, also a lesbian.)

On May 16, 1836, Edgar Allen Poe married his thirteen year-old cousin Virginia. This was an act that would later be replicated repeatedly and in excess by a number of people in Arizona, Utah and Texas, causing periodic and exasperating shortages of pastel dresses in the American Southwest.

On May 16, 1919, Liberace was born. Why is he part of this post? "Staaahp it!" you shriek. Also in the arts, on this day in 1929, woman-identified-woman poet Adrienne Rich was born; and on May 16, 1947, lesbian feminist poet, scholar and essayist Cheryl Clarke was born and began to revolutionize African-American literary tradition on May 17.

On May 16, 1985, actress Margaret Hamilton, otherwise known as Miss Elvira Gulch (aka, the Wicked Witch of the West,) died in Salisbury, CT, after having successfully avoided houses falling from the sky for decades. She would make famous various phrases that are now indispensable to queer people in the United States: "Surrender, Dorothy;" "And your little dog too!" and "I'm melting! Melting!" Her cruelty to Dorothy Gayle would secure Judy Garland's status as a gay icon forever, and allow queer people to mutter to each other about Miss Mary Thing across the room who thinks she's hiding something, but is in reality droppping hairpins all over the house, "I hear he's a friend of Dorothy's...."

In Case You've Ever Wondered: the Radical Testifies on Gay Marriage

I wrote this essay back in September, at the request of the Zenith student newspaper, which had posed the question of whether I thought gay marriage would ever be legal. Since I am trying to fulfill several long standing writing commitments this weekend, I offer you this turgid little polemic, only slightly edited, in place of a new post. It will, in fact, be new to you -- unless you are a member of the Zenith community; or my attorney, who is working on the gay marriage legislation in our state; or one of the many queer intellectuals who have written about marriage and whose thoughts I have inevitably learned from/cribbed from here.

It also seems like a timely essay to re-print, given yesterday's decision by the Rhode Island State Supreme Court that Margaret Chambers and Cassandra Ormiston, having married in Fall River, Massachusetts, may not divorce in Rhode Island, where they live and where gay marriage is not yet legal. Here goes:

I think gay marriage will be legalized in the United States, but not because it delivers equality to gay and lesbian people, although that is one way of understanding marriage -- as simply a matter of one’s legal status that is governed by the equal protection clause of the Constitution. However, marriage itself is also a social institution that does not, in and of itself, make one set of people equal to another in a society characterized by class, racial, gender, age, physical and national inequalities.

For example, although marriage conveys rights to a spouse that are often material (health care, rights of survivorship, citizenship, community property, and legal relationships to children adopted during the marriage are good examples), these are “rights” that only people who already have property, full citizenship or high-status employment can convey at all. Marriage will do nothing to improve the status of homeless, unskilled, migrant or under/unemployed LGBTQ people: the majority of us in other words. Marriage will do nothing to ensure access to healthcare for queer people in relationships where neither partner has health insurance benefits as part of their employment package.

However, gay marriage will be legalized eventually, although not because it would be a theoretical move toward social justice. It will be legalized because marriage itself is an extraordinarily conservative institution, and a method by which the state has limited the distribution of civil rights and economic privileges over time to those citizens who agree explicitly or implicitly to derive some, or all, of the economic support necessary to sustain life from a nuclear family structure. That marriage is also perceived by many people, straights and queers, as a more “moral” status is in fact a way of restating the previous idea, in which "morality" is constituted by independence, or the appearance of not being dependent, on public welfare structures. Neoliberalism, as well as conservatism, works on this principle: the political emphasis of the last thirty years has succeeded in reshaping United States society, and much of the world, to conform to an economic vision that valorizes independence, rather than interdependence.

Gay marriage will also not be legalized because marriage is a particularly successful institution, because it offers principles for living a life that are easy to adhere to, or because it is comprised of personal commitments that most people truly understand or agree to. As an activist colleague of mine once said in conversation, after Massachusetts legalized gay marriage, “If they like gay marriage, they’ll love gay divorce.” But despite its many failures, marriage continues to be understood as a platform from which complete personal happiness will follow, an idea that is not new but which resonates to our particular historical moment, one where securing private happiness dominates popular success narratives.

That said, the political importance of marriage as a conservative institution is this: it is both a legal status and a symbolic realm that can stand in for equality, so that social inequality need not, in the end, be addressed through state redistribution of resources. Marriage, in other words, is not just the natural outcome of a romance between two people, as many gay and lesbian marriage advocates portray it: it is a political romance about what constitutes a well-ordered, and just, society.

For a much less polemical, and more original, take on gay relationships in general, go to this post by GayProf. For pro-marriage positions in my liberal state, which has recently legalized civil unions and where a marriage bill has been presented to the legislature several times without success, go to Love Makes a Family. And here's a link to a short film about gay marriage in Massachusetts, sent by the first commenter to this post, Charlotte Robinson, of OUTTAKE, that gives you a pretty accurate picture of the arguments and strategies of advocacy groups.