by Darcy Kues
As Megan beautifully said in our last Legal Voice blog post, same-sex couples won a great victory last week when
the Supreme Court struck down the so-called Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).
Justice Kennedy wrote powerfully about the disparaging
effect of DOMA on couples that States seek to protect and treat with dignity. The
Supreme Court’s decision in United States
v. Windsor does have far-reaching effects; for example, the fall of DOMA
(Section 3, at least) removes a critical barrier to binational couples seeking
to live together without fear of separation in the United States. (In fact, a New York City immigration judge stopped a
removal proceeding moments after hearing the news on DOMA’s
unconstitutionality.)
And yet, we must recognize that the movement for
justice for queer folks does not end with marriage equality. Although marriage
is an important institution for many people regardless of sexual orientation
and therefore should be accessible to every adult citizen in America, it is not
enough. It is not nearly enough to
fight for marriage equality without fighting against injustice on every front.
Queer people in America face significant barriers to
access to health, access to education, and access to justice. Young LGBT people
(especially those that are bisexual or transgender) are disproportionately
represented in homeless populations, due at least in part to
hostility or exclusion from their families. Young queer people are also disproportionately under the care of the state, either in foster care or juvenile justice facilities, and many states
have no policies in place to protect young people under their care from
harassment or discriminatory treatment by staff or other youth. Queer people
are overrepresented in prison populations, and face severe
harassment while incarcerated (from both staff and other
prisoners). For many queer people, health care is not only inaccessible because
of cost, but also because of the harassment and judgment they face when
attempting to receive critical health care. Young LGBT people still face
harassment and violence at school, and often receive education that further
stigmatizes their own identities if it doesn’t ignore them altogether. In New
York City, many transgender women of color are being arrested for prostitution simply because they are transgender and condoms are found in their
bags when police search them. Many trans folks cannot even go to the restroom
in public with experiencing discrimination and harassment; let’s not forget
that just this past Spring an Arizonan legislator introduced a bill in the Arizona state legislature that would
made using the bathroom in accordance to your gender identity/expression a crime.
Marriage does not solve these issues. We should be
proud that another discriminatory law is off the books; we should celebrate
this victory, but we should not become complacent or satisfied until everyone receives full protection under
the law and everyone is treated with
dignity and respect.
Just as loudly as we celebrated the fall of DOMA, we
should have protested the Supreme Court’s dismantlement of the Voting Rights Act and its weakening of
Title VII. Thanks to the Court’s decision in Vance v. Ball State
University, now it will be even
harder for women and LGBT folks to bring a successful employment discrimination
claim.
The fight for LGBT justice means mobilization
against injustice on all fronts; in order to truly break down barriers for
queer people in America, we must commit to breaking down barriers for people of
color, people with disabilities, women and feminine-identified folks,
immigrants, working class people, people experiencing poverty and/or
homelessness, and young people. One identity does not live in isolation to
others, and we all have wonderfully complex identities that uniquely position
us in American society.
As Audre Lorde once said, “there is no such thing as a
single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” In other
words, LGBT rights are women’s rights.
And, until we all work together to dismantle systems of injustice for all
communities and for all people, none of us will ever
truly be free.
Darcy Kues is a third year law student at University of Washington School of
Law and is currently interning with the New York Legal Assistance Group LGBT
Law Project in New York City. She interned with Legal Voice in Spring 2013,
where she researched the potential implications of the overturning of DOMA, as
well as information on emergency contraception availability and issues of
standing in the Supreme Court marriage cases. She is so thankful for everything
she learned at Legal Voice, and is excited to take the knowledge she gained and
apply it to her future work in legal advocacy for LGBTQ folks.
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