Today, Explained - R-E-S-P-E-C-T (for Marriage Act)

Episode Date: December 9, 2022

Sen. Tammy Baldwin managed to rally bipartisan support for a marriage equality bill, but she’s the first to admit the legislation is “humble.” An activist wonders if there’s an overemphasis on the institution of marriage. This episode was produced by Siona Peterous, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Paul Robert Mounsey, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained   Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The motion is adopted. Outgoing Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi had reason to be excited this week. She notched a big, huge, historic win in a lame duck session of Congress, no less. The Respect for Marriage Act takes key steps to uphold marriage equality under federal law. This is what we're celebrating. But not everyone's excited. The bill's biggest sponsor in the Senate told us the legislation is humble. The Respect for Marriage Act is actually a pretty humble piece of legislation.

And an activist we spoke to said maybe marriage has been sucking the oxygen out of the room for like a few decades now. I would be pushing for essentially a different sort of a bill that would recognize the multiple ways in which people create family structures, right, in our culture. All that and more ahead on Today Explained. The all-new FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino is bringing you more action than ever. Want more ways to follow your faves? Check out our new player prop tracking with real-time notifications. Or how about more ways to customize your casino page with our new favorite and recently played games tabs. And to top it all off, quick and secure withdrawals. Get more everything with FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino.

Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600. Visit connectsontario.ca. Today explained December 2022. This year will be remembered for the Dobbs decision that came out of the Supreme Court of the with abortion, that it should go after other unenumerated rights like same-sex marriage, which the Supreme Court legalized in 2015 with the Obergefell case. That freaked out a lot of Americans and a lot of politicians who thought this was settled law. And some of them, including Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, decided to do something about it. And this week, Congress passed the Respect for Marriage Act, though he spoke with the senator last week when it passed the Senate. So the Respect for Marriage Act is actually a pretty humble piece

of legislation because we know after the Dobbs decision that there's a threat out there. There's an open invitation that's been issued by Clarence Thomas to re-litigate marriage equality. What it does, the Respect for Marriage Act, is it repeals the Defense of Marriage Act, which was passed in 1996 to create a federal definition of marriage as being between a man and a woman, and basically saying that the federal government would not be forced to recognize same-sex marriages should any state approve it. By the way, at the time the Defense of Marriage Act was enacted, there was no state in the United States that recognized same-sex marriage. The second thing it does is basically says, regardless of the law in each state, if you are in a marriage that it was legally valid where entered, when

entered, that needs to be respected by the federal government and every other state by virtue of the full faith and credit clause of the U.S. Constitution. For those who might want to be married in the future, sadly, it does not force every state to allow same-sex marriages. But again, it says if you were to marry in the future in a state that does recognize it, so long as that marriage is legal, where and when entered into, it will be recognized by any other states. It's a critical piece of legislation moving forward should the court ever reconsider Obergefell. You called this a humble piece of legislation moving forward should the court ever reconsider Obergefell. You called this a humble piece of legislation, which I think means it doesn't do as much as

you maybe wished it did. What did this fall short of doing, the Respect for Marriage Act? You know, it turns out that it is very, very complicated to codify a decision like Obergefell. And I'd love to also give the analogy of the comparison between this and the interracial marriage case back in 67 called Loving v. Virginia. When that case was decided and it struck down all the states that had laws banning interracial marriage. At the time that case was decided, Virginia and 15 other states had laws on the books barring interracial marriage. Today, zero states still have those laws on the books. But it took until the year 2000 for the last state to repeal its ban on interracial marriage. Meanwhile, because of the Loving v. Virginia decision, it was legal everywhere and they were recognized everywhere. But the states took that long to go back and review their statutes when the Supreme Court overturned Roe

v. Wade, many states, including my home state of Wisconsin, had never repealed their criminal abortion bans. Ours dates back to 1849. Now, jettison to the same-sex marriage discussion, today, 35 states have either statutory or constitutional bans on same-sex marriage. So we have the Obergefell decision, but I don't know how long it is going to take for all of those states, including my own, to repeal those laws. And frankly, that's why we need the insurance of the Respect for Marriage Act. What we were unable to do in this law is repeal or alter state constitutions, repeal laws in the 50 states, right? You can't do that from the federal level. So you're saying you couldn't comprehensively legalize same-sex marriage? Exactly. And plus, we regulate marriage and oversee marriage at the state level. So you're saying you couldn't comprehensively legalize same-sex marriage?

Exactly. And plus, we regulate marriage and oversee marriage at in this country. At the same time, you only got support from 12 Republicans. What were the rest of them saying when they told you, I can't back this bill? My Republican colleagues, they were hanging their hat on different excuses, if you will. I would say it's probably only a small handful who would say, I oppose same-sex marriage, I disagree with the Obergefell decision, and therefore I would not want to vote for the Respect for Marriage Act. I think rather what we were seeing was a lot of arguments brought forward that were false, but too many people were giving them credence. There were a lot of assertions made, again, falsely that this somehow impinged religious freedoms. It doesn't. It's a status quo.

The base bill was status quo. But some of my Republican colleagues felt that they needed clarity, that they needed questions answered. And the way in which we addressed those questions got the support of a dozen Republican colleagues. But frankly, others just didn't come on board. I read that some of your colleagues across the aisle were, you know, citing religious freedoms, even though a lot of major religious institutions, including the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which in the past has been pretty vocally against gay rights, was supporting this legislation. What gives there? Communities of faith want, of course, to be assured that they won't be forced to celebrate

marriages that aren't consistent with their faith traditions. And Obergefell never created that pressure. You know, there's a lot of folks who go around saying the sky is falling, the sky is falling, but in fact, it's not. But the Church of Latter-day Saints was, I think, very sincere in their discussions with proponents of the Respect for Marriage Act, and they were also interested in the clarity of making sure that we're talking about marriages between two people, not polygamous relationships. Once those issues were addressed, yes, indeed, we won the support of the Mormon church, some of the entities representing evangelical churches, Orthodox Judaism. I mean, it was amazing the coalition of folks that came together just because we added the clarity that this bill

will protect the status quo with regard to religious liberties. Help me square what you all have accomplished in Congress with what's going on in the states right now. According to the Human Rights Campaign, there have been over 300 anti-LGBTQ bills that have been proposed in state legislatures across the United States in the past few years. It feels like federally we're moving in one direction, and then in some states we're moving in the exact opposite direction. One of the things I would say is I suspect a huge percentage of those state laws and state bills that are being introduced are particularly targeting the transgender community

and particularly trans youth. It's been so disheartening to see the sort of legislative attacks that our transgender community is facing. And of course, we have to stand together and fight these pieces of legislation. And I will tell you that the rhetoric is also present on Capitol Hill. I think where we are seeing this arc of progress has a lot to do with the fact that in the years since the Obergefell decision, that so many Americans, including my colleagues on both sides of the aisle in the United States Senate, now know married couples, same-sex couples. They may have family members. They may have somebody on their staff. They may

have somebody who they go to church with, a couple who live down the road. And that has changed hearts and minds, and it has moved people, and it has gotten us from a place where this vote this week would have been unthinkable a decade ago. But this week, with 61 votes, we were able to pass the Respect for Marriage Act. We have a lot further to go with regard to true equality and true equity for the entire LGBTQ community. And do you think it's only a matter of time? I think that one of the things that is proven is that as people see us and know us, that hearts and minds change.

And that has to continue to happen. Visibility is key to creating change and to creating progress. Senator Tammy Baldwin, Wisconsin. More Today Explained in a minute. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures is a great way to keep up with family, and Aura says it's never been easier thanks to their digital picture frames. They were named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an Aura frame as a gift, you can personalize it, you can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an Aura frame for himself.

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LGBTQ activist Kenyon Farrow was happy to see the Respect for Marriage Act get through Congress, but not, like, over-the-moon happy. In fact, he's been feeling ambivalent about this country's fight for marriage equality for a minute now. since I was one of the loudest, you know, kind of critics of the same-sex marriage movement coming from within the LGBT community. I think that a lot of people may be surprised to learn that there was actually a lot of debate, really going back, frankly, into the 1990s, about whether the LGBT movement should pursue marriage equality at this point, you know, for several reasons. One of the critiques, you know, that I have had and a lot of other, you know, LGBT activists

have had of the same-sex marriage work is that it really drew, you know, a lot of resources and time and energy and policymaking into, you know, one issue, you know, first and foremost, a lot of the funding for other kinds of work that LGBT organizations were doing dried up in the 2000s. So if you weren't fighting for marriage, funders were reticent to fund your work, right? I worked for an organization in New York City, you know, in the 2000s, and we were organizing homeless people in New York City's shelter system and doing policy change work, welfare, the social safety net, institutions, and also the Department of Homeless Services in New York City. And after marriage became legal in New York State, the organization ultimately closed

because there wasn't funding to do that kind of work. About a year or two later, the state equality organization, Empire State Pride Agenda, closed its doors. The initial response from funders was just to not fund because marriage had passed, so obviously LGBT people couldn't possibly have other sort of policy needs for a statewide organization to advocate on behalf of. Lastly, the LGBT community, particularly gay and bisexual men

and transgender women, still make up the vast majority of people vulnerable to and living with HIV AIDS in the United States. And it was tension in the 2000s about whether LGBT groups wanted to continue to do work around HIV AIDS because they didn't want the sort of message that gay men in particular were still at risk for HIV to sort of get in the way of their messaging around, we're just like everybody else too. We're just white suburban dads, you know, trying to raise kids, right? And so there are all these ways in which the fight for same-sex marriage definitely pulled resources out of other LGBT work. And organizations literally closed,

despite the fact that they were doing work around homelessness and housing, which is still a huge issue for, particularly for LGBT youth in America, around immigration and LGBT folks, around a whole host of other issues that just were not seen as important. Generally in American society,

people are getting married less and not more. And so what do we do with the number of sort of family configurations and households that are not married, but also could benefit from other kinds of civil protections for the kinds of families that they have, but are not necessarily protected just because the people aren't having sex or in love with one another in that kind of romantic way. One example that, you know, I've used a lot over the years is, you know, what about the Golden Girls?

The Golden Girls? Like the TV show? Absolutely. The Golden Girls, the TV show. I like you and I like cats. I also happen to have a room for rent and the name is Blanche Devereaux. Hear me out. So part of what I'm saying is fewer people are getting married or fewer people are staying married for their entire lives. And so we have an aging population in the U.S. A number of stories have been written over the last, you know, 20 years of, you know, senior citizens who are coming together to cohabitate and live together and share resources. They don't live with their children or near their children, and they become each other's, you know, kind of primary caretakers and the people closest to one another, although they are not in, you know, romantic or sexual relationships and they may not be blood relatives.

So what do we do with with, you know, households like that? Right. And I think that we have a lot of different ways in which people are kind of making their households work and constructing family that don't get protected by a marriage per se at all. And myself and a lot of other folks in the LGBT movement for many years advocated for a different kind of a system that would allow for people to be able to determine, this is my family, this is the person or people whom I want to be able to make decisions for me in any situation where I might be, you know, ill or incapacitated or whatever, where I want other sort of benefits to go, we live together, we should be able to file jointly as a household, etc. That isn't about, you know, whether or not you, you know, won at the dating game, essentially. It sounds like you've been advocating for this for decades.

Is it not going well? Well, actually, when I explain it to people that way, people get it, right? I've had this conversation within the LGBT community. I've had it with relatives of mine, and they're like, oh, that does make a lot of sense. Why aren't we doing that? But I think... Why aren't we doing it? Why aren't we doing it? Is it because it's kind of harder to define some of these less traditional household relationships? I mean, because roommates can be the people you consider family, but they could also be the people

who drive you nuts, who you wish you to live with, right? Well, isn't that true of your biological family? Being related to people doesn't necessarily mean, you know, that y'all are always, you know, in love with one another. So, but you do know that at the end of the day, that these are the people who may have your back, right? In a range of different ways. you know, I have the same kind of, you know, ethical and moral or religious compass as a

straight person because my relationship can be also viewed in the eyes of the state and of God or whatever in the same, you know, kind of way. So I feel like there's some of it is that people are attached to what a marriage, given that it does have a kind of quasi-religious sort of moral sort of centering around it, are invested in Congress mean that we've actually made progress here and that might benefit the progress that you'd like to see? I do think that the bipartisan support does show some sort of social progress, but let's also look at what's happening here in Ohio just this very weekend in Columbus, Ohio, which since the 1990s, Columbus, Ohio has been thought of as like one of the cities that has a very large, you know, kind of LGBT population.

And we had Proud Boys show up armed at a drag queen story hour for kids and shut it down. The event was canceled after the Ohio chapter of the Proud Boys, which is an extremist organization, announced they planned to protest the event. More than 50 members of the Proud Boys still showed up to the canceled event to protest. So on the one hand, we are in a place where there have been a lot of sort of advancements in culture and representation, et cetera, and even in this case, potentially legally. But we are still also living with the real blowback of the advances that the LGBT

community has made in the last 20 years. That tells me that we still are not, you know, where we ultimately need to be. If you were a senator in the United States Congress, what would you be pushing for in this moment, if not the Respect for Marriage Act? I would be pushing for essentially a different sort of a bill that would recognize the multiple ways in which people create family structures, right, in our culture. And what are the ways in which we can create legal protections for all of those families? And that would, of course, keep people who are currently married, whether straight or gay or lesbian or what have you, in, you know, they would still be married, they'd still be able to do those things.

But then for the rest of us who are unmarried or who have other sort of, you know, kind of household dynamics or relationships, the Golden Girls is the easiest sort of example that everybody knows. But, you know, you could also think about, you know, the series Pose, right, on, you know, FX and think about like the house and ballroom community, which are LGBT folks, right, who are, you know, in a certain kind of relationship with another. People often live together. You ever consider joining a house? What do you mean? Well, a house is the family. You get to choose. I'm a house mother. There's a range of different household configurations in this country that we just don't talk about. And we just act like everyone is kind

of waiting to the day that they can kind of get up in a Vera Wang on any given Sunday and walk down the aisle. When in fact, most people are actually living their lives in beautifully constructed ways that have nothing to do with Ozzie and Harriet. And those folks deserve the ability to legally protect their relationships and their families as well. Kenyon Farrow, he's a longtime LGBTQ activist and the VP of policy

for an organization called Point Source Youth, which does work on LGBTQ homelessness. I'm Sean Ramos-Firum. This is Today Explained. We were produced today by Siona Petros, edited by Matthew Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, and engineered by Paul Robert Mounsey. The rest of our team includes Victoria Chamberlain, Hadi Mawagdi, Halima Shah, Amanda Llewellyn,

Miles Bryan, and Avishai Artsy. Amina Alsadi is our supervising producer, Afim Shapiro is our director of sound, and I'm honored to share the stage with the first Noel King. We used music by Breakmaster Cylinder and Noam Hassenfeld, and had a little extra help from Patrick Boyd on the ones and twos

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