UNL Martin Luther King Jr. Address
PFLAG Member, Dr. Jim Kimberly
In the first part of Jim's speech, he spoke of growing up in the 1930's and 40's in segregated Savannah, Georgia. He outlined the legal forms of social, political and economic discrimination against blacks, spoke of his parents' prejudice, how he felt this and damaged them and how he came to disagree with them.
Kimberly also told of the incredibly unequal school facilities for blacks and whites in a small Georgia town he studied as an undergraduate at Emory University in 1949 and how such unequal facilities had perpetuated economic oppression of black for many generations. Then he compared the blacks' situation to that of the GLBT community today.Although there is still prejudice and discrimination toward racial and ethnic minorities and women today, prejudice and discrimination we must continue to strive to overcome, some progress has been made. We are much further from treating as fully human people whose sexual orientation or gender identity differ from our own.
The most recent example of this in our state is [Initiative] 416, which attempts to forever prevent gays and lesbians from being able to pursue politically the right to state-recognized domestic partnerships and the benefits these might provide. Some 70 percent of Nebraskans voted for the amendment.
It was presented under the guise of protecting marriage, but marriage was never threatened in the first place. The movement to adopt 416 was spearheaded by radical conservative Christians, and it was, I think based on the idea that the sexual orientations it opposed were sins.
Guyla Mills, who began the movement to adopt the amendment, responding to a statement by one of her newly acquired allies that the amendment was only designed to protect marriage, was quoted in the Lincoln Journal Star as saying that this was not her view, that she wanted gays and lesbians to know that their behavior was sinful. The amendment was actually a political justification of a religious belief. I suspect that many Nebraskans saw only the save marriage rationale.
William L. Shirer's "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" documents that as Hitler moved against the Jews through the creation of legislation depriving them of civil rights, many Germans looked the other way. Many whites looked the other way as blacks were oppressed by law in the South. I think many Nebraskans looked the other way in the case of 416. Fundamentally, 416 is a denial of the basic human rights of a group of people who differ from the majority in a single aspect of their lives: whom they love.
An example is the right to health insurance coverage for a same-sex life partner. At UNL, gay and lesbian faculty and staff have no right to cover a partner and should the university move toward granting domestic partnerships, I suspect they will be told 416 prohibits them. Another example, medical decisions. Even though a gay or lesbian couple has a durable power of attorney concerning such decisions, and member of a gay or lesbian person's family of origin can contest the power of attorney in court. This could prevent a decision to terminate life support in a hopeless case.
Yet another example is inheritance rights. Being a non-legally recognize partner, a surviving gay or lesbian pays a graduated Nebraska inheritance tax on anything inherited via a will from their partner. For example, upon inheriting a $100,000 house, a partner would pay $16,000 in taxes. Joint ownership does not prevent this tax. A heterosexual spouse pays nothing.
A final example is the adoption of a partner's children from a previous heterosexual marriage. Inability to adopt means that dependent children do no have the safety of the support of their parent's partner. The partner, for example, could not make any medical decisions for the child in the case of the child's parent being unable to make such decisions unless the parent had made a power of attorney giving that specific right to his or her partner.
To prevent gays and lesbians from attempting to obtain such rights dehumanizes them. It has something in common with the treatment of blacks by whites in the South. One of the forms of discrimination against blacks in the South that I have not yet mentioned was laws against interracial marriage. At the time the U.S. Supreme Court ruled such laws unconstitutional in 1967, 16 states, largely southern, had such laws. Just as race was given as a basis for denying marriage then, so today sexual orientation is given as a basis for denying legally recognized same-sex domestic partnerships.
So again we return to the same thesis. To the extent that we dehumanize gays and lesbians, we dehumanize ourselves. We damage ourselves when we do not see all human beings as entitled to be treated with worth and dignity.
I want to conclude my remarks by quoting Coretta Scott King concerning sexual orientation and gender identification. She recently was honored by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, receiving the organization's "Honoring Our Allies" award for demonstrating extraordinary commitment to equality for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.
In accepting the award Mrs. Kind said, "I accept this award as a reaffirmation of my commitment to carry forward the unfinished work of my husband, Martin Luther King, Jr. My husband understood that all forms of discrimination and persecution were unjust and unacceptable for a great democracy. He believed that none of us could be free until all of us were free, that a person of conscience had no alternative but to defend the human rights of all people. ... I want to reaffirm my determination to secure the fullest protection of the law for all working people, regardless of their sexual orientation...it is right, just and good for America."
Her words say better than mine that freedom from oppression has to include everyone. We are all damaged when we do not see all human beings as entitled to be treated with worth and dignity.
Source:
The PFLAG News Letter, Spectrum
Original Publication Date: February 2002
Used with permission.
