Your Friday Awesome: Teh Gays Are After Your Husbands (and are hilarious)

This is kind of pure genius. An Australian sketch comedy show tackled marriage equality by co-opting the epitome of masculinity in current pop culture. The last three lines made me snort.

Transcript available at Feministing.

"So, that means you love each other!"

In honor of DC legalizing marriage for all:



I have a very vivid memory of my small self sitting on the floor looking at my two aunts and thinking, "hmm, that is more than one aunt..." reconciling that fact with my parents' relationship, and then simply moving on to whatever I did next. Its really that simple.

Full transcript at Shakesville.

Permission

Although...there should be no asking of anyone's hand since it is a decision made by two equal parties to enter into a partnership, but still a very clear message about the inanity of marriage inequality.

The Love Letters Project

As I've said before, my husband and I were lucky enough to be married when everyone in the state of California could be. We were thrilled that our marriage license read "Party A" and "Party B" (though I think two lines with "Spouse" might have been nicer). We filled out the license at 8:30 in the morning before we headed off to work, and knowing that many other couples were filling out the same lines at the same time, made us even more giddy.

To be honest, for most of my adult life, I was a bit ambivalent about the politics of marriage. I figured if the religious right was going to throw a hissy fit about extending marriage rights to all, then why not just change the semantics. Legalize "civil unions" for everyone and leave "marriage" to the religious folks. In other words, let everyone go to the courthouse to obtain all the rights provided by the state, but if you want to have a it recognized by whatever god you believe in and be "married," more power to 'ya, but that shouldn't have anything to do with the law.

The problem is that uniting two people with all of the legal obligations and privileges of the state ignores the heart of the matter - just that, the heart. Thankfully, in the U.S. we have moved past the origins of marriage, you know things like kinship and dowries, so that for most of us marriage really is about love. And there is just something far more romantic about telling people, "We're married," than, "We are civilly unioned!"

Which is why I think The Love Letters Project is a very powerful way to work toward marriage equality. Crystal and Christina were married in Iowa this summer, but their marriage is not recognized in Wisconsin where they live, nor is it in much of the country, and of course not by the federal government. Which is why Crystal has been writing a letter to President Obama every day, relating the daily joys of her marriage and asking him to extend civil rights to everyone. She even sent him postcards from their honeymoon in Spain:


Thanks to Laura at Adventures of a Young Feminist for the heads up.

No, You Don't Need to Speak with My Husband

One of the people I met in Austin was the amazing Starr C. who has started the insightful and funny Suburbtopia. Some might call it a mom blog, but really it is about living as a feminist when you are also a wife and mother and graduate student and a veteran and work full-time and you do all of those things awesomely. Really. In the middle of Texas.

She recently shared her experience of trying to find a realtor whose gender norms were not firmly planted in 1952. After setting up the initial process on her bank's website, the bank-assigned realtor called and said this:

I'm sorry, I thought Starr was your husband's name. Should I discuss the selling of your home with him or is it okay to talk with you on these matters?

When Starr C. told her that she could more than handle the call, the realtor then questioned whether or not it made sense for her to work in addition to her husband, because could her salary really cover the cost of day care?

Yeah, that is how you start a good client relationship. By being totally intrusive and condescending. Oh, and the realtor was a woman. Who obviously works, and who works in real estate. But, of course she assumed that she makes more than Starr C. and understands real estate better. Obviously she hasn't met Starr C. That woman is probably smarter and more skilled than most people on the planet. Needless to say, she got a new realtor.

In a recent post, I talked about how I chose not to change my name when I got married, and that it has not caused the end of civilization. But, regardless of the fact that I did not change my name when I got married, the assumptions tied up in the grand idea of "marriage" are so ingrained that most people assume you have taken your husband's name, regardless of whether or not you have. Built into that assumption is the belief that along with taking your husband's name, you also relinquish your power to your husband, particularly your economic power.

Starr C.'s post reminded me of my first experience of working against this assumption. As I said, most people assume we have the same name. The only reason they know we don't is if both of our names our on a document. And in that case, there have never been questions of why our names don't match, but of whose name should go first.

The most jarring example of this, was when we filed our first taxes as a married couple. Since it was our first time filing, we figured it would be a good idea to talk to a professional to see if we should file jointly or separately and to make sure we got it all right. We gathered all our paperwork and went down to visit a very jolly man my family has known for years. All was going well. We asked if we should file separately or jointly. He said jointly would be our best bet. He asked if I changed my name. Nope. Okay, moving on. Then he asked who should be the primary name and social security number on the return and who should be the "spouse". Both my husband and I said I would be.

You would have thought we said to make our cat the primary. For a good five minutes the accountant tried to dissuade us and make me the spouse, "because that is what he IRS is used to." Really? I thought they were used to processing things by social security number. Oh, and they are also used to seeing my tax returns because I hadn't gone straight from being my father's dependent to my husband's, since you know coverture is over.

My insistence (backed by my husband) that my name be first on the return had nothing to do with asserting our feminist principles to the federal government. It has to do with the simple reality that our relationship is egalitarian to begin with. Each of us have different strengths and interests, and based on those strengths and interests we divide up the household responsibilities. Sure, no one likes doing the dishes, so we try and do our fair share. However, when it comes to the economic front, I am the one that makes sure bills are paid and we are getting the best deal on our cell phone and internet contracts.

Not because I am better and handling money, we make decisions jointly and my husband has managed his own finances and that of his touring band for years, but because I am more comforatble dealing with people on the phone when things having to deal with money don't run smoothly. A wierd charge on our credit card? I call to clarify it. Our internet is down? I call to see what the problem is. Our renter's insurance needs to be adjusted? I call to talk to them about it. Why? Mostly because I am more comfortable asking to speak with someone's manager when I don't get the answer I need or they continue to try and up-sell me.

So, if I am the one handling all this on a daily basis, wouldn't it make sense that I be the one to file our return? Afterall, the world revolves around social security numbers, or at least the last four digits. When we merged a few accounts where it made sense to keep my husband as the primary, it has been a pain to try and remember the last four digits of his social security number in order to get anything accomplished. And god forbid if something was wrong on our return, it would be me that ended up talking to the IRS.

Of course, I didn't share all of these details with our tax guy. Instead, I resorted to framing the discussion in terms of finance-speak and asserted, "I am the CFO of this household!"

It worked. My name is first. Now lets just hope I never have to talk to them.

My Name Might Just Cause the End of Civilization as We Know It

Evidently 70% of American's think I am a bad wife and 50% think the government should put me in line.

No, really. My most recent post for Mother Jones is about a national study on family and gender issues, the results of which shocked even the researchers.

Frankly, I agree with Jessica at Feministing who originally linked to the article. I think choosing one's name is a personal decision and marriage may or may not be the catalyst for why someone chooses to change it. There might be many reasons a woman chooses to drop the last name she was born with. And people change their name all the time for other reasons. Call yourself Princess Sparklebutt - if that is how you identify, more power to 'ya.

In my case, I am the daughter of a feminist who decided to keep her last name and adopt my dad's. She then passed down the convention to both my sister and I. I think its great. My middle name is pretty damn interesting and unique (at least in this country). So when it came to what I was going to do, it wasn't necessarily an either/or option for me. I didn't necessarily want to adopt my husband's last name, but in the end the decision was pretty easy.

We were sitting on the couch one day before the wedding - not actually talking about anything having to do with the wedding (for once), when he said:

You're not going to change your name are you?

Turns out, in his view, the person he fell in love with was the person I was then, name and all, and that is who he wanted to marry - and that, is one of the many reasons I wanted to marry him.

We toyed around with other options: making a new combo one, or both of us adopting my middle name. But, we eventually decided (after all of ten minutes) to stick with the names were already had. It might just be because I'm lazy, but it seems like that is the easiest decision. Correcting well meaning in-laws and friends a few times is much easier than having to make sure my last name is changed on every sort of official documentation, work correspondence, and online account.

And guess what? The world has not come to an end.

The Marriage of Economic Civil Rights

Using your "morals" as an excuse to refuse birth control, or emergency contraception, or any other prescription or medical procedure is inexcusable. This is not the 1400's: "Oh, I'm sorry, I can't save (or better) your life because the Almighty God wills it so." Uh, uh. We have moved through the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment, so lets move on and do our jobs.

But, in the argument over Prop 8 that quickly went to the economics of weddings, I tended to think that if a florist or caterer didn't want the business of non-hetero couples, so be it. It's your economic, social and (yes) moral loss. I mean we boycott businesses for political reasons all the time, this seemed to be in that vein.

In my own search for vendors, I actively sought out if not outwardly feminist folks, people who did not swallow the WIC Kool Aid.* I wasn't interested in being around people, and more importantly, giving them my money, if all they were going to do was talk about my big daaaaaaaaayyyy and freak out when then realized I wasn't wearing a veil.

But, then I read this blog by Kevin Drum. And he brought up an very good point:

After all, do same-sex couples really want to hire photographers and caterers who make it clear they loathe them? Probably not. But then, you might have asked the same thing 50 years ago: do Southern blacks really want to eat at lunch counters where they obviously aren't welcome? As it turned out, yes.

It turns out, this really isn't about a simple case of wedding vendors, after all.

But once they start covering bog ordinary commercial establishments that don't have even a tenuous connection to a church and want to discriminate merely because they don't like gays — well, that's a line that gets pretty hard to draw pretty fast. What's worse, in some places it's a line that would essentially take over entire towns. If a caterer can refuse to sell me a wedding cake just because I'm gay — despite state law that would normally outlaw such discrimination — can a landlord refuse to rent me and my newly married partner an apartment despite fair housing laws saying he has to?

So this really isn't about just hiring vendors. It is about rights, no matter how you slice it, because we cannot separate economics from civil rights. We can certainly separate marriage from religion. Have a super religious wedding if you want, not everyone needs to take communion, or jump over a broom, but everyone should have the opportunity to file a simple piece of paper with their county clerk and enjoy the municipal, state and federal rights that it provides. Thank goodness it looks like we are on our way.

*No, not the social program for mothers and children...the Wedding Industrial Complex. Trust me, this is not an exaggeration.