Anti-Gay Efforts: Oppression Disguised as Civic Duty

Cody Fine was born in 1982 in a house overlooking Candlestick Park in San Francisco, the only child of a lesbian and the woman she then loved. If some condemned his situation, or deemed it unnatural, Cody didn’t know it. “For a long time,” the high school senior drolly remembers, “I just figured some kids came from two moms.”

He was in sixth grade when he learned what bigots mean when they use the word “faggot.” He came home and told his parents he felt like he’d been punched. Once, he’d bragged about having two mommies. Now he learned overnight how to keep his mouth shut: “I started lying. If anyone asked, I’d pretend my biological mom was my mom and my other mother was my dad.”

Now he saw his life through the judging eyes of others. Now he realized that, even in an open-minded city, there was intolerance. His mothers had separated when he was 5. It had seemed a divorce then, like other kids’ divorces, with two households and weekend visits. Now he didn’t know what to call it. His biological mother had taken a new partner when he was 7, a woman whom he’d viewed as a loving stepparent. Now his family landscape seemed a jumble of, “like, 5 billion aunts” and a biological father whose involvement had been basically as a friend and sperm donor--humiliating in its differentness.

He switched schools, but his resentment lingered. Secretly, he wished for a normal family--whatever that was. He was halfway through eighth grade when, finally, fear gave way to curiosity: The teacher assigned a year-end research project, and he found himself choosing the topic “Children of Gay Parents.” Though Cody is heterosexual, to this day he refers to that report as “my coming out.”

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It has been a big year for the crusaders who condemn people like Cody’s mother, for the don’t-ask-don’t-tell people, the gay-bashers, the preachers of shame. They have been busy, drawing the rest of us into their battles--now stamping out a gay-straight student alliance in an Orange County school district, now stumping for a state ballot initiative that, at great public expense, would preempt the extremely remote--one might even say imaginary--possibility that same-sex marriage might creep into this state.

The debate, as ever, has latched onto sex--that aspect of love that always fixates disapproving people. The problem is, sex takes only minutes, and this has been one long debate. Decades have passed while the mainstream has struggled with acceptance, to the point that we’re no longer just talking about public policy and consenting couples. Now we’re talking about those couples’ children and families.

In an analysis to be released today by Stanford University, for example, family law professor Michael S. Wald says that Proposition 22--the ban on same-sex marriage--would not only be redundant if passed, but would also jeopardize the few legal protections that exist for California’s 400,000-plus gay and lesbian families. A former deputy counsel for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Wald says similar “defense of marriage” statutes in other states have given anti-gay groups a platform from which to argue that any equal treatment for homosexuals is outside state policy.

So far, he says, it’s unclear how those arguments will hold up, but they’ve been the basis for several challenges to medical, legal and other benefits for same-sex domestic partners--benefits that, for example, can mean health insurance for a kid like Cody, or parental leaves for both parents after a child’s adoption or birth. The law still does nothing to address matters that children in straight families get to take for granted--things like inheritance and child support. So far, these and other questions have remained a legal gray area, kept there by the same kinds of arguments once used to outlaw interracial marriage. By the most conservative estimates, this situation, in California alone, is punishing upward of 50,000 kids.

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That this sort of human issue would have to be argued in scholarly research is, of course, its own sort of travesty. These anti-gay campaigns aren’t about civic duty. They’re about the need to oppress, which, in the end, depraves everyone, even bystanders like you and me.

Cody Fine’s eighth-grade report was so brave and true that it got him into an exclusive private high school. To fulfill a community service requirement for graduation, he now speaks about his upbringing to student groups. To hear him weigh in on crusading opponents of same-sex marriage (“It’s, like, get over it!”) is to hear your own kid--comical and quirky. To see how he jokes with his mothers is to laugh at your own family. The kid’s doing great. Less clear is how much more the rest of us will suffer for this long and unnatural crusade.

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Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.