Tag Archives: doma

married naming, nine months later

06 Saturday Jul 2013

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In the months before we got married, Hanna and I decided we were going to combine our middle names upon marriage:

  • Elisabeth + Jane = Elisabethjane
We even had our rings engraved with the word: a design we created ourselves by each writing the others’ “maiden” middle name:
I even wrote a guest blog post about our process for The Last Name Project, which I still think accurately captures our reasoning and the symbolism we saw in taking this approach.
But then some things happened.
First, when we went to fill out the forms at the town hall in Brookline, pursuant to obtaining a marriage license, there was no way to change your middle name upon marriage. The clerk didn’t care. The bureaucracy only cares if you’re going to change your last name(s). Which, practically speaking, means you can only change your last names if you want to change your names without additional cost and seamlessly with the marriage paperwork.
“That’s okay,” I said while we were standing in the office. “We’ll just take care of it later, separately.” 
We were going to have to file for two legal name changes, at $165.00 per person, in Probate and Family Court. With all of the other wedding-related details and expenses, it seemed like a detail we could follow up on later.
Then, on the night before our wedding, Hanna suddenly realized it was important to her that we share a last name. “What if something happens?” She asked, into the dark as we lay in bed talking about it. “How will people know we were ever married? How will they know you belong to me?” 
We had previously discarded the notion of hyphenated last names as unwieldy, though neither of us — historians to the core — wanted to walk away from our family of origin names altogether. So at the eleventh hour, we revisited the hyphen option and have settled on Clutterbuck-Cook as the shared last name we will eventually take.
Eventually being the key word here, since nine months later we’ve yet to file the paperwork and pay the $330 in fees to get it all taken care of. Expense is a barrier, as is the lingering question of whether we’ll move forward with our shared middle name plan, in addition to the last name change, or whether that’s just too extensive for any one person to bear: Anna Elisabeth Jane Clutterbuck-Cook? I mean, it’ll basically never fit on a form. Ever. Again. Not even the forms for effecting the change!
And then DOMA was an excuse for not deciding. “We’ll do it when DOMA falls,” I said, eventually. It seemed like a good way to mark the expansion of marriage equality. And practically it seemed like the sensible thing to do. Why change our names when the federal government would refuse to acknowledge we were legally pledged to one another anyway.
But now DOMA is no more (yay!). Plus, our passports are up for renewal, making a natural time to get everything formalized. 
So I’ve been starting to just kind of play around with this new last name of ours. When I sign up for new accounts online. When I fill in a return address on an envelope. On Twitter. On my blog. Probably soon in the signature line of my work email:
  • Anna E. J. Cook?
  • Anna J. Clutterbuck-Cook?
  • Anna E. Clutterbuck-Cook?
  • Anna E. Cook?
  • Hanna and Anna Cook-Clutterbuck
  • Anna and Hanna Clutterbuck-Cook
Right now I have a handful of variations on this theme rattling around the Internet. Slowly, I think Anna J. Clutterbuck-Cook is winning out, although part of me still wants to add the Elisabeth too. 
I admit, part of the reason I’m reluctant to let go of the intertwined middle names is that it seems like an elegant and egalitarian solution. Everyone we told the middle-name plan to thought it was awesome and radical and why-had-no-one-thought-of-this-before? At the same time, like Hanna, I feel the undeniable pull of social legitimacy — that thing same-sex couples, particularly, are both applauded and shamed for desiring. Like Hanna, I want us to be unmistakably married. And in modern, Western culture sharing a last name or names with one’s spouse is a fairly unmistakable linguistic act: We two, together.

(Or “we three,” perhaps, for some — though not us.)
I don’t think it’s queer, or feminist, failure to want recognition or legibility for who we are. And the society (and legal paperwork) through which our lives are filtered shape our choices. 
If the marriage certificate forms had allowed us to change our middle names, it would be done.
But they didn’t; because that’s not how it’s done.
(That’s not “how it’s done” for straight men, either, in many states. Massachusetts law treats both spouses equally but in many states husbands who change their last names upon marriage incur additional fees or outright refusal.) 
The Internet is strange, too. Do I just grandfather in my Twitter handle? Email address? Even my most widely-used internet handle, annajcook doesn’t acknowledge my marriage linguistically. Do I ditch it and start afresh? It seems untidy, somehow, lacking in efficiency, either way. 
Why can’t everything magically switch over, like when you change your profile picture on Google and suddenly every platform shows the new you?
But on the other hand, I like to think this period of messy uncertainty gives historians of the future a trail of breadcrumbs for us all as we move through the virtual and analog universe: Here we are, tangled together. Somehow. We’re still working out exactly how. 
But one way or another, we’re going to make sure people know it’s We two, together.

photograph by Laura Wulf (2012)

while reading windsor [friday night thoughts]

29 Saturday Jun 2013

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Things have all been a bit hectic since Wednesday morning, and what with one thing and another I’m just getting around to reading the full text of United States v. Windsor this evening. Scalia’s dissent is as wonderful as everyone’s been saying it is, and I feel the visual representation of his feels might look something like Paul Rudd’s hissy fit in Wet Hot American Summer (with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg standing by in the role of Janeane Garofalo, of course):

But all joking aside, there is another aspect to this landmark decision, apart from the opportunities for comedy and even just the straightforward legal-political victory which is the end of DOMA and the practical inequalities it enacted. And that is the fact that, as a bisexual woman married to my wife in the state of Massachusetts, there is something incredibly personal and incredibly powerful about reading a majority opinion written by the Supreme Court of the United States not only affirming my equal rights as a married citizen, but affirming our rights as sexual citizens not to be devalued because of our same-sex relationships.

It’s not like my marriage was somehow lesser, or invalid, while DOMA was still the law of the land. I don’t need the government to approve of my behaviors or relationship choices in order for me to feel like they were (are) the right ones for me.

But sociopolitical marginalization, cultural erasure, and silencing happen when our voices are not heard, or listened to, in the halls of power. The majority opinion in Windsor is one small instance of feeling myself fairly and fully represented — honored, even — in a document issued by the highest court in the land. So often, national debate on issues that have direct bearing in my lived experience — women’s health, sexism, student loans, labor rights, environmental sustainability — feel like they are discussed in some bizarre vacuum by people whose lives are vastly different from my own, and who have made no honest effort to understand (much less honor) what my life is like and what would make it better.

Then, every once in a while, someone (in this case a group of someones) with a great deal of power and authority hauls it up from their toes and produces something like this:

DOMA’s principal effect is to identify a subset of state-sanctioned marriages and make them unequal. The principal purpose is to impose inequality, not for other reasons like governmental efficiency. Responsibilities, as well as rights, enhance the dignity and integrity of the person. And DOMA contrives to deprive some couples married under the laws of their State, but not other couples, of both rights and responsibilities. By creating two contradictory marriage regimes within the same State, DOMA forces same-sex couples to live as married for the purpose of state law but unmarried for the purpose of federal law, thus diminishing the stability and predictability of basic personal relations the State has found it proper to acknowledge and protect. By this dynamic DOMA undermines both the public and private significance of state-sanctioned same-sex marriages; for it tells those couples, and all the world, that their otherwise valid marriages are unworthy of federal recognition. This places same-sex couples in an unstable position of being in a second-tier marriage. The differentiation demeans the couple, whose moral and sexual choices the Constitution protects, see Lawrence, 539 U. S. 558, and whose relationship the State has sought to dignify. And it humiliates tens of thousands of children now being raised by same-sex couples. The law in question makes it even more difficult for the children to understand the integrity and closeness of their own family and its concord with other families in their community and in their daily lives. (Windsor, 22-23; emphasis mine).

For a reminder of just how awesome — in the classical sense of the world — the use of such language is in relation to our rights as non-straight sexual citizens, go and read E.J. Graff’s personal-historical look back over the last half-century of political movement on other-than-heterosexual rights.

The court is far from perfect — as evidenced by its Voting Rights ruling on Tuesday — and the affirmation of queer folk as fully part of the national community is far from complete. But I am all for recognizing the gains as well as the losses, and this is — for all that we’ve become nearly blase about same-sex marriage these past months, cock-sure that DOMA was going to fall — this still is a pretty amazing, even breath-taking gain on the side of humanity.

here’s hoping [for the downfall of #doma]

26 Wednesday Jun 2013

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photograph by Laura Wulf

Hanna and I worked out last night that this week marks the fourth anniversary of our officially becoming a couple, in that intimate, couple-y, sharing-a-bed-ahem sort of way.

I’m enough of a Supreme Court junkie to find it somewhat appropriate that this is also the week (and the day and nearly the hour) when SCOTUS will be handing down their rulings on the DOMA and Proposition 8 cases.

Here’s hoping we’ll be able to file a joint tax return next year.

Here’s hoping that after 10 o’clock this morning we’ll be one babystep (babyleap?) closer to queer folk being fully recognized as the legal and social citizens that we rightfully are of these here United States.

And then we’ll turn around and keep on working toward the next shuffle forward.

what matters in "gay marriage" – "gay" or "marriage"?

02 Tuesday Apr 2013

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cross-posted from the family scholars blog. 

I often joke with friends and family about how my wife and I are “gay married,” as if this is something different from being … “married.” Perhaps we same-sex couples do everything with our sexual orientation front and center? In that case, this past weekend I celebrated a gay birthday by going gayly out to dinner at a restaurant. I did some gay crocheting, took a gay nap, and wrote a few gay letters to friends.

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This is, by and large, a lighthearted amusement. But the “joke” is also grounded in our bone-deep recognition that some people do view every aspect of our lives as unalterably tattooed by our sexual “perversions.” Our being gay — or practicing gay sex — is the attribute that marks us out for differential treatment. Some people would argue it requires differential treatment.

I thought of this other, less amusing use of the phrase “gay marriage” or “same-sex marriage” last Friday when I listened to an On Point news hour reviewing the Supreme Court oral arguments on DOMA and Proposition 8.  The host, Tom Ashbrook, spoke with two guests — law professors Suzanne Goldberg (pro-marriage equality) and Teresa Collett (anti-) — about the arguments. In discussing DOMA, Collett followed the lead of defense lawyer Paul Clement, representing BLAG, in arguing that what the DOMA law sought to achieve was not any sort of discrimination between gay and straight marriages, but rather to impose legal uniformity.

From the oral argument transcript (p. 62-63):

Mr. CLEMENT: … Ms. Windsor wants to point to the unfairness of the differential treatment of treating two New York married couples differently, and of course for purposes of New York law that’s exactly the right focus, but for purposes of Federal law it’s much more rational for Congress to — to say, and certainly a rational available choice, for Congress to say, we want to treat the same-sex couple in New York the same way as the committed same-sex couple in Oklahoma and treat them the same. Or even more to the point for purposes -­

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: But that’s begging the question, because you are treating the married couples differently.

I want to point out a couple of features of this exchange.

The first is that Clement (and Collett, on air) are attempting to erase the anti-gay sentiment that animated the passage of DOMA, something which Justice Kagan highlighted when she read aloud from the House Report during the argument (see p. 74 of the transcript). This “softer” argument makes the case that what the federal government really wanted was sameness — equality if you will! — so that despite marital diversity at the state level, the federal government would only recognize certain types of marriage as actually legal nationwide.

I find this in itself disturbing, in that it attempts to turn DOMA into something that’s almost supposed to benefit same-sex married couples rather than harming them — as if we’re supposed to be comforted, somehow, that our citizenship rights will be the same nationwide … by ensuring that no matter what level of relationship recognition our state of residence provides us, we’ll be firmly denied recognition at the federal level. Consistently.

Equality! Yay! …. oh, wait.

The second (and I think key) feature of this uniformity framing, and the exchange Clement had with Justice Sotomayor above, is that Clement is emphasizing the gay part of being “gay married” and Sotomayor is emphasizing the married part of being “gay married.”

Clement is arguing that regardless of whether a same-sex couple lives in Massachusetts (where we can legally marry), in Illinois (where they have civil unions) or in Michigan (where same-sex couples are denied any form of legal recognition), we will be met with federal uniformity … in that we won’t be recognized, regardless of our state-honored status.

Based on the fact that we’re gayly married, instead of straight married.

Sotomayor pushes back against this emphasis, asking instead “isn’t this treating the married couples differently”? Placing the emphasis on marriage, Sotomayor is correctly pointing out that we do not seek to treat all straight couples similarly, regardless of relationship status. We treat a cohabiting straight couple differently from a married straight couple differently from a divorced straight couple. One might ask, following Clement’s line of argument, why the federal government distinguishes between an unmarried cohabiting couple in Wyoming and a married couple in Maine — shouldn’t they be concerned about uniformity in the treatment of straight couples on a national level?

(As an aside, I actually think this is a legitimate line of questioning — the differential treatment of married and unmarried partnerships — but that is not, realistically speaking, the argument Clement was making. So it is the topic of another post.)

This is not to say that understanding LGBT* identities as political in nature, as social class identities, is never legitimate. Identity politics — coming together with a group of people based on some facet of your identity in order to effect political change — is, of course, sometimes a necessary thing. Often, such class consciousness is made necessary by the way we are targeted as a group by those who hold anti-gay beliefs or take anti-gay actions. I move through my life aware that my bisexuality and my lesbian relationship are key components of my self-conception — and also aspects of my self by which other people both understand and judge me.

I am proud of being both “gay” and “married.”

But I do think that when it comes to marriage law, it should be the married part of that equation that has bearing, not the gay. As someone who is legally married, under laws that pertain to marriage it should be that status which determines whether I am a person to whom the law applies or not.

from the neighborhood: sunning cats & SCOTUS nailpolish

24 Sunday Mar 2013

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While Hanna was dozing in the bedroom this afternoon, and I was listening to Jeff Chu’s interview on the Diane Rehm Show through their online streaming (have I mentioned how much public radio totally rocks and that we’re proud supporters?), I decided to paint my fingernails in rainbow in anticipation of this coming week’s oral arguments before the Supreme Court on the legality of bans on same-sex marriage.

Like it’s any secret, but I think my nails probably give my position on the matter away.

What with the wedding ring and all.

The cats were unimpressed with my politics and beauty regime, particularly since there was nothing edible in it for them.

They preferred to spend the afternoon sunbathing in our living room.

(Sometimes I suspect Teazle is a slinkie in disguise.)

(And also that one day she will figure out how to reach the hanging plants…)

Hope you all are having a restful weekend — more coming later in the week on queer porn, queer families, sex and relationships, SCOTUS, DOMA, and all the rest!

fun with amicus briefs! [doma & the supremes]

11 Monday Mar 2013

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cross-posted from the family scholars blog.

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Thanks to Amy’s recent post that linked to John Culhane’s piece on the importance of amicus briefs, I spent a nerdy afternoon this past weekend browsing through some of the many briefs submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court in relation to the two same-sex marriage cases that will be reviewed by the court this session. They are all available to read in PDF at the American Bar Association’s website; you can also find a list at the SCOTUSblog. I thought I’d share a few highlights with you. Of particular interest to the folks at Family Scholars might be the brief submitted jointly by the Family Equality Council, Colage, Our Family Coalition, Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network, the Center on Children and Families,  the Child Rights Project, and Sarah Gogin. Together, they seek to represent the children raised by same-sex parents as well as young people who experience same-sex desire as they look toward a future forming adult relationships. They begin:

The voices of children raised by same-sex parents — those who live every day within the family structure at the heart of these lawsuits — are too often unheard in debates about same-sex couples and marriage. Their stories are too often missing from discussions of “traditional” families or “family values,” and their personal experience too often discounted as irrelegant. Although those who oppose marriage for same-sex couples frequently make assumptions about the quality of the children’s family lives, the children themselves are rarely asked to explain what they actually experience.

Throughout the brief, they foreground the voices of young people who are growing up with LGBT parents, and their list of “authorities” (the brief equivalent of a bibliography) offers a valuable starting point for thosee interested in learning more about the experience of people who have grown up within LGBT households. As the brief asserts,

Although the Proponents [of Proposition 8] claim an interest in stabilizing the American family structure, the elimination of marriage for same-sex couples in California and the refusal to recognize valid married couples on the federal level have the exact opposite effect. Placing an official stamp of governmental opprobrium on the relationships of same-sex parents instead serves to stigmatize and de-legitimize the relationships, and, as a result, the children themselves.

Not to mention, the children of our nation who will grow into adult same-sex desires and relationships:

By officially sanctioning their exclusion from marriage and placing existing marriages of same-sex couples in the singular position of being “not marriages” for federal law, these measures exacerbate feelings of hopelessness about the future and perpetual “different-ness” that many LGBT youth already feel and discourage them from aspiring to full participation in civic life.

As an historian, I was also pleased to see both the Organization of American Historians (OAH) and the American Historical Association  (AHA) had filed briefs discussing the history of marriage law in the United States. The AHA draws on the scholarship of its professional membership to make several key arguments: that the federal government has historically deferred to state law when determining marital status; that the meaning of marriage is not limited to procreation; that marriage practices have changed over time, and that this is a strength not a weakness of marriage as a social institution. From their summary of the arguments:

Control of marital status is reserved to the states in our federal system. Marriage has always been understood as a civil contract embodying a couple’s free consent to join in long-lasting intimate and economic union. In authorizing marriage, states turn a couple’s vows into a legal status, thus protecting the couple’s bond and aiming moreover to advance general social and economic welfare. Throughout U.S. history, states have valued marriage as a means to benefit society. Seeing multiple purposes in marriage, states have encouraged maritally-based households as advantages to public good, whether or not minor children are present, and without regard to biological relationships of descent. …For two centuries before 1996, state marital diversity reigned, along with serious inter-state contestation, without Congress stepping in to create marital “uniformity” for federal purposes. Congress never took a position on a marital eligibility question pre-emptively so as to discredit a policy choice that a state might make. Before DOMA, federal agencies assessed marriage validity by consulting the relevant state laws. In historical perspective, DOMA appears as an attempt by Congress to single out particular state-licensed marriages for disfavored treatment.

The OHA, in a brief filed with the American Studies Association, takes up a slightly different aspect of the case.  They outline the history of discrimination towards sexual minorities in the United States, and pointing toward legal precedent for taking history into account when assessing the full weight of discriminatory practice:

As professional organizations devoted to the study of American history and culture, amici are not before the Court to advocate a particular legal doctrine or standard. But they wish to advise the court that the historical record is clear. Gay men and lesbians in America have been subjected to generations of intense, irrational, and often violent discrimination, commencing as soon as they emerged as a group into American public consciousness and continuing today.

The NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund reminds the court of its historic role in guaranteeing equal protection rights to all citizens, asserting that “The role of the courts is to safeguard the rights of historically subordinated groups by applying heightened scrutiny to laws like DOMA, that disadvantage them as a class.”

And finally, it was also heartening to see a number of briefs from religious organizations supporting marriage equality, including one filed on behalf of a truly heartwarming number of faith traditions: the Bishops Of The Episcopal Church In The States Of California, Connecticut, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Vermont, and Washington and The District Of Columbia; The Jewish Theological Seminary Of America; Manhattan Conference Of The Metropolitan New York Synod Of The Evangelical Lutheran Church In America; The Rabbinical Assembly; The Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association; Reconstructionist Rabbinical College; Rabbi Akiva Herzfeld Of Shaarey Tphiloh; The Union For Reform Judaism; Unitarian Universalist Association; United Church Of Christ; The United Synagogue Of Conservative Judaism; Affirmation; Covenant Network Of Presbyterians; Friends For Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, And Queer Concerns; Methodist Federation For Social Action; More Light Presbyterians; Presbyterian Welcome; Reconciling Ministries Network; Reconciling Works: Lutherans For Full Participation; and Religious Institute, Inc. (yes really!). Their premise is:

Americans are a religious people, but diversely so. Religious adherents differ on contentious issues, and religious bodies have themselves evolved and disagreed over time — on marriage as well as other civil rights and social issues. In view of that history and the wide range of modern religious thought on same-sex unions, it would be a mistake to elevate any one view on marriage above all others as the “Christian” or “religious” view. Indeed, it would be constitutionally inappropriate, because civil marriage is a secular institution … and the Constitution bars the government from favoring certain religious views over others … Religious freedom means that all voices may contribute to our national conversation, but particular religious perspectives on marriage cannot be permitted to control civil recognition of marriage for all.

These highlights represent just a handful of the perspectives filed with the court, and I encourage all of you to go explore on your own — and share what briefs spoke to you, and why, in comments.