Truth, Justice, and the American Queer
When a group of otherwise law-abiding citizens is made felons because they will not lie to their government, as the lawfully civilly married same-sex couples in the United States are who refuse to buckle to government coercion to deny our marriages with the federal and all but a handful of state and municipal governments will not lie, something is deeply wrong so far beyond economic injustice as to make a lie of the very notion of a free and just nation.
I am, by definition not my own, a scofflaw. The rule of law, thus, by all rights, has no more hold over me. I am left to my own devices with regards to justice. Strange that by my government's attempts to rob me of freedom and justice, I am freer than I have ever been, including free to define justice and good citizenship as I see fit.
Of course, this is just another exercise of honesty in fulfillment of personal integrity -- the culmination of a lifetime's worth of choices. And I am, after all, just one in a long line of increasingly free people who have chosen personal truth over the pressure to lie. In the last hundred years alone we've lived authentically despite Comstock, Pink Triangles, McCarthy, Livingston and the Postal Indecency laws and witchhunts, professional licensure bans, touching while dancing bans, college student witchhunts, liquor sales bans, Stonewall Riots, Don't Tell the Truth to the Military Lest the Generals Get the Vapors, sodomy laws, and the ever-pervasive coming out -- so many ways to try to silence a people, to shame a people, to try to erase our very existence.
Telling the truth is so human, so perilous, so simple, so revolutionary.
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I am, by definition not my own, a scofflaw. The rule of law, thus, by all rights, has no more hold over me. I am left to my own devices with regards to justice. Strange that by my government's attempts to rob me of freedom and justice, I am freer than I have ever been, including free to define justice and good citizenship as I see fit.
Of course, this is just another exercise of honesty in fulfillment of personal integrity -- the culmination of a lifetime's worth of choices. And I am, after all, just one in a long line of increasingly free people who have chosen personal truth over the pressure to lie. In the last hundred years alone we've lived authentically despite Comstock, Pink Triangles, McCarthy, Livingston and the Postal Indecency laws and witchhunts, professional licensure bans, touching while dancing bans, college student witchhunts, liquor sales bans, Stonewall Riots, Don't Tell the Truth to the Military Lest the Generals Get the Vapors, sodomy laws, and the ever-pervasive coming out -- so many ways to try to silence a people, to shame a people, to try to erase our very existence.
Telling the truth is so human, so perilous, so simple, so revolutionary.
