If Deb Price wrote for mainstream Americans about same-sex couples in everyday situations, she thought, society would have a harder time denying them equal rights.
Photo courtesy of NYTimes.com
As the nation’s first nationally syndicated lesbian columnist who wrote regularly about gay life, Deb Price certainly covered pointed issues, like the debate over gay people in the military.
But she also turned to small matters of everyday domesticity, telling readers, for instance, that she and her partner, Joyce Murdoch, had bickered over whether to get air conditioning in their new convertible. She wrote about gardening together. She described attending Ms. Murdoch’s high school reunion.
She wanted to convey that being in a committed same-sex relationship wasn’t all that different from being in a heterosexual one — except maybe for the presents.
“We watch our siblings get eight silver trays, 12 pickle forks, a fondue pot and a trip to Hawaii for settling down,” she wrote. “And then our relatives give us a hard time or nothing at all.”
Ms. Price sought to demystify gay life for Middle America. If her readers could see same-sex couples in ordinary situations, she reasoned, they would find them less foreign and less frightening — and would have a harder time denying them equal rights.
She wrote 900 columns over 18 years and believed that they might have had something to do with the reversal in cultural attitudes that led to the legalization of same-sex marriage in 2015.
www.nytimes.com by Katherine Q. Seelye, December 10,2020
Click here to read the entire article.
The post Deb Price, a First as a Columnist on Gay Life, Dies at 62 appeared first on Time For Families.
Source: Time for Families
What is most troubling about Anthony Kennedy’s legacy is what he did not do. Kennedy was a wordsmith, much to the chagrin of many in the legal community. He never clearly defined what level of legal scrutiny gay people deserved in equal protection cases. The equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution provides for different levels of protection depending on which category the discriminated class falls into. The legal scrutiny that a class receives often determines whether the discrimination is permissible or not. The key indicators of whether a case deserves heightened scrutiny were, perhaps purposefully, left out of Kennedy’s written decisions regarding LGBT litigants. He shied away from describing gay people as a “subject classification.” 
Don’t get me wrong, I have great respect for most religious belief. My family holds hands and says what we are thankful for before every meal. We acknowledge the need for divine intervention with friends and family who are dealing with health issues. We have ingrained just such a respect in our son to be tolerant of others, even those who would mock and deride our family just because it has two dads.
Justice Kennedy held that, “When the Colorado Civil Rights Commission considered the case, it did not do so with the religious neutrality that the Constitution requires. In other words, because of the Commission’s original treatment of the baker’s claim, no matter whether the result of their analysis was correct, the process was tainted from the start and therefore the holdings of all subsequent courts agreeing that the baker violated the rights of the petitioning gay couple, who, as Justice Ginsburg stated in her dissent, “simply requested a wedding cake: They mentioned no message or anything else distinguishing the cake they wanted to buy from any other wedding cake Phillips (the Respondent) would have sold.” But because the process was tainted with anti-religious bias, the underlying discrimination was no longer relevant. 
