Something That I Have Been Saying…

Someone posted this on Facebook yesterday, It is an article that is almost a year old but still is timely,

What if the LGBTQ movement fought for prison abolition rather than same-sex marriage?
Waging non-Violence
By Isabelle Nastasia
May 5, 2014

The Against Equality collective is an archival project created by five queer and trans activists and writers. First and foremost, their new book is an anthology of critiques of the issues that have come to define gay and lesbian politics over the past 20 years. But it also proposes alternative paths for the movement, putting forth both prison abolition and transformative justice as distinctly queer political projects.
[…]
Today, gay marriage is centered as the LGBTQ issue. But the first section of the book is an archive of critiques of gay-marriage legislation in favor of more broad-base policies like universal healthcare. Why?

At the first event I ever did, this woman from Athens, Maine, which is a town of a couple hundred people, came. She’s a down-home, DIY mama kind of person. She’s raising a disabled daughter and her partner at the time was disabled. One is an intellectual disability and the other one is a physical disability.
[…]
So if marriage isn’t materially beneficial for many people’s lives, how has it coalesced into the central LBGTQ issue? And where do we go from here?

There are lots of poor people who have been convinced that this is the way forward by a bunch of upper class gays that have rammed it down everybody’s throats.

I think that if we get back to people’s actual lives, we can find a way forward. If people want to make the argument that gay marriage will get more people health care, let’s talk about how to get all people health care regardless of marital status. Same thing for immigration. Same thing for having secure family law. Family law should not revolve around the ideology of the nuclear family. It should reflect people’s actual lives.

I like the fact that marriage equality has progressed, but… I think there are so many more important things that should have been placed before marriage. Things like employment, housing, public accommodations, fair credit, prison reforms, healthcare, and the list could go on and on. It looks like marriage equality will be achieved with the Supreme Court case but it will still be legal to fire or evict someone who is LGBT in the 29 states based on sexual orientation, and in 32 states based on gender identity.

Marriage equality is great but it does not affect all LGBT people just a few while these basic human rights affect every LGBT person and should have been the priority.