Before there was a battle for LGBT marriage equality, there was a battle for recognition and acceptance. Marriage equality may be the current movement, but human rights remains at the core of the debate.
Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people have been struggling against society’s views towards homosexuality for years. Although views of LGBT people have certainly evolved over time, it remains a constant uphill battle. Being gay was once defined as a mental illness or sickness by the American Psychiatric Association, and was only just removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Illness in 1973. Psychological studies of LGBT people to back this notion were not based on science or fact, but in inference and assumption.
As far back as 1920, studies were conducted on LGBT people in order to better understand this phenomenon, and gay conversion therapy was introduced. Many years later, psychologists like Sigmund Freud and Alfred Kinsey began conversations around homosexuality--Kinsey creating his famous Kinsey Scale, which explores varying levels of heterosexuality and homosexuality in individuals, declaring that sexual orientation wasn’t so black and white. Freud believed people were born inherently bisexual, and even went as far to say that homosexuality "is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation; it cannot be classified as an illness."
Many states had laws against LGBT people based upon psychiatric assumptions, making it illegal for gays to work for the federal government or serve in the military, sending many into hiding, or criminalized in what was known as the Lavender Scare. In 1962, Illinois became the first state to repeal sodomy laws and to decriminalize homosexuality, one of the first of many LGBT milestones. However, today in 2014, a dozen states still have sodomy laws, and Louisiana recently just re-enacted a sodomy law, which regresses LGBT rights nearly fifty-two years.
A timeline of LGBT Rights in the United States.
The term homophobia, first introduced in 1969, was defined as “an irrational fear of homosexuality,” or “an aversion to gay or homosexual people or their lifestyle or culture,” according to the American Heritage Dictionary in the early '90s. Homophobia is the driving force against gay marriage. With oppositions deeply rooted in religion, psychology and legality, LGBT people face oppression for simply being who they are. Some are closeted, hated, beaten, criminalized, kicked out of their homes, shunned by their families and communities, and are treated as less than human. And this isn’t even bringing marriage into the equation.
It is important to remember that once there was a time in this nation when interracial marriage was not allowed because of issues rooted in racism, similarity based upon assumption, prejudice and ignorance. Some would call this the civil rights movement of our day. LGBT rights, civil rights, and women's rights, are all one in the same, the basis being human rights.
A suggested alternative to gay marriage are civil unions or domestic partnerships, which give LGBT couples legal rights similar to that of marriage. The first civil union was enacted in Vermont in 2000. Currently six states recognize civil unions, two of which will be recognizing them as same-sex marriages due to a recent vote.
Most civil unions include responsibility for supporting each other, state tax benefits, improved access to healthcare, inheritance rights, the right to leave work to care for an ill partner, and some co-parenting rights; however, the rights vary by state. With these rights varying state by state, it leaves a lot of room for interpretation once state lines are crossed, and are null if that state does not recognize them. According to Freedom To Marry, civil unions allow LGBT people to have marriage rights while still treating them as second class citizens, alluding to the notion of separate but equal.
Freedom to Marry begs the question, “what difference does a word make?”
Apparently a heck of a lot.