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Wisconsin Gay Marriages Halted By Federal Judge Who Struck Down Ban

Wisconsin Gay Marriages Halted By Federal Judge Who Struck Down Ban
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — A federal judge on Friday put same-sex marriages in Wisconsin on hold, a week after she struck down the state’s same-sex marriage ban as unconstitutional, a move that allowed more than 500 couples to wed over the last eight days.

U.S. District Judge Barbara Crabb’s ruling Friday means that gay marriages will end while the appeal from Republican Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen is pending. Couples who were in the middle of the five-day waiting period to get a license, which most counties waived, are caught in limbo. Van Hollen requested Crabb put her ruling on hold, arguing that allowing the marriages while the underlying case was pending created confusion about the legality of those marriages.

In her order, Crabb expressed mixed feelings.

“After seeing the expressions of joy on the faces of so many newly wedded couples featured in media reports, I find it difficult to impose a stay on the event that is responsible for eliciting that emotion, even if the stay is only temporary,” Crabb said in her order. “Same-sex couples have waited many years to receive equal treatment under the law, so it is understandable that they do not want to wait any longer. However, a federal district court is required to follow the guidance provided by the Supreme Court.”

The ruling came exactly one week after Crabb declared the state’s ban on gay marriage unconstitutional. But Crabb didn’t issue any orders on how state officials were to implement her decision, and amid the uncertainty, nearly every Wisconsin county — 60 of 72 — issued licenses.

Crabb issued an order preventing clerks from denying same-sex couples marriage licenses, but then put that on hold as well as her earlier ruling striking down the law as unconstitutional.

John Knight, attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, which challenged the law, called Crabb’s decision to put her order on hold disappointing.

“But we will fight for a quick resolution on appeal and are confident that marriage will be a reality in Wisconsin very soon for lesbian and gay couples who have waited much too long already,” he said in an email.

Van Hollen said he was “very pleased” with the ruling.

“County clerks do not have authority under Wisconsin law to issue same-sex marriage licenses,” he said in a statement. “Judge Crabb’s stay makes this abundantly clear.”

Van Hollen said he will appeal her ruling striking down the law to the 7th U.S. Circuit Court.

Allen Rasmussen, 46, and Keith Kitsembel, 49, who have been together for 14 years, asked the Portage County clerk nine times since Monday to get a marriage license.

“I think it’s ridiculous,” Kitsembel said after the ruling Friday. “I furthermore am very, very, very disappointed in our county clerk in Portage County. We had a small window of opportunity to get married, and she refused to grant us a license nine times in five days.”

They were part of a silent protest Friday outside the Portage County courthouse.

As of midday Thursday, 555 same-sex couples had gotten married in the state, based on an Associated Press survey of all 72 counties.

Van Hollen said Thursday that same-sex couples with marriage licenses aren’t legally married because Crabb hasn’t issued an order telling county clerks how to interpret her ruling striking down the law. Van Hollen also said district attorneys could charge clerks who issued licenses with a crime.

Crabb reiterated in Friday’s 30-minute hearing that clerks were issuing licenses to same-sex couples on their own.

“I never told them not to and I never told them to do it,” Crabb said.

The ACLU and others say because Crabb found the law unconstitutional, and didn’t order clerks not to issue licenses, they could legally give them to couples seeking to get married.

Crabb’s order did not address whether same-sex marriages completed over the past week are valid.

Wisconsin’s constitutional amendment, approved by 59 percent of voters in 2006, outlawed gay marriage or anything substantially similar. The ACLU said the ban violated the constitutional rights of eight gay couples to equal protection and due process and Crabb agreed.

Gay rights activists have won 15 consecutive lower court cases since a landmark Supreme Court ruling last summer, with Wisconsin being the latest.

Wisconsin is among 13 states with gay marriage cases pending before appeals courts.

_____

Associated Press writer Carrie Antlfinger contributed to this report from Milwaukee.

www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/13/wisconsin-gay-marriages-halted_n_5493690.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices&ir=Gay+Voices

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Playing in the Spaces

Playing in the Spaces
In Harvey Fierstein’s Tony-nominated play, Casa Valentina, men embody women. Or rather they reveal themselves through women’s clothing, mannerisms and identities. Set in 1962 and based on real events at a Catskills resort, the story follows (self-identified) straight men who escape the constraints of their everyday lives through opposite gender identifications. Under the masterful direction of Joe Mantello, the varied, mellifluous, and vibrant ways these men come to life as their alter egos emboldens us to question the word identity itself. And the roles gender plays in it.

As psychoanalyst Adrienne Harris writes, “Some… are caught up in the losses and emptiness of identity, some in the deep enmeshment of body and psyche, and some in the sliding and playful paradoxes of performance and authenticity.“

The men in the play are initially caught up in the deep enmeshment of body and psyche, as their coherence as a group depends upon strict rules when dressed in their female embodiments: e.g., they must address each other by their chosen female names. This doesn’t leave room for recognizing the losses and emptiness of identity, as we witness the novice newcomer, Jonathan, getting ignored as (s)he makes her/his virginal entrance as “Miranda,” fumbling to the dinner table unkempt. But when Miranda attempts to make a coy exit, empathy and a strong sense of play spontaneously take hold of the seasoned cross dressers. They all agree to give her a makeover together, emphasizing the playful paradoxes of performance and authenticity with regard to identity, despite their rules.

And here is where the production becomes magical, luring us into the characters’ secret, enchanted world; their “Garden of Eden,” as one of them refers to it. This is not RuPaul’s Drag Race; they are not trying to outperform one another. During this sequence you get the sense that these men-as-women are being rather than doing. As each of them delights in decorating Miranda in their own unique, authentic, and playful way, we begin to forget who’s a man, who’s a woman, and who cares. One could appreciate here Adrienne Harris’ suggestion that gender is not rigid, fixed or binary, but rather that it is “softly assembled.” We become absorbed in the the shared playfulness among the characters, particularly in the ways they shower Miranda/Jonathan with loving recognition. As Harris writes, “There is a deep expansiveness that comes from recognition and belonging, and there are the quirky spurts and frissons when the unexpected, the transgressive, the novel emerge into view.“

But as with any story with a “Garden of Eden,” a snake must slither in to keep things real. Before dinner is over, the game of dress-up becomes one of Axis and Allies as a discussion about a rule to ban gays from joining their revelry fractures the group. The two leaders rigidly defend the “no queer’s allowed” policy, effectively turning the soft light of their rarefied, idyllic play space into one more common and harsh.

Founding psychoanalyst Melanie Klein’s theories may help to explain this split between “good” straight crossdressers and “bad” gay men. As I have written elsewhere, Klein theorized that in states of anxiety — such as being a “straight” man who feels the need to secretly dress as a woman — we split self and other. We create a them-versus-us, pushing away feelings of vulnerability, dependency and need. In such moments, we fail to hold both “good” and “bad” feelings — we continue to split and project rigid notions of “good” versus “bad,” “masculine” versus “feminine,” “straight” versus “gay.” A current example of such splitting is the palpable transphobia that runs through the LGBTQ communities.

The climax of Casa Valentina erupts in Act II, during a festive dance party when one of the men kisses Miranda, causing her to instantly split by turning back into Jonathan with an aggressive, defensive, punch. The party is over.

In 1991, nearly 30 years after the play takes place, psychoanalyst Virginia Goldner argued that “gender coherence, consistency, conformity, and identity are culturally mandated normative ideals” and that “to conform to their dictates requires the activation of a false-self system.” The play makes this point as its unsettling conflicts are born out of the characters’ rigid conformity to normative ideals, causing them to uphold a brittle, ultimately destructive, “false” sense of self: e.g., as unquestionably “straight” men by day and as women with entirely different biographies by night. They could take a page from Goldner, who suggests that “the ability to tolerate the ambiguity and instability of gender categories is more [desirable] than the goal of ‘achieving’ a single, pure, sex-appropriate view of oneself.” Twenty some odd years after Goldner penned her article we are still in need of its message.

Thinking back on the enchanting, dreamy delights of the play’s Act I reminds us that the characters had within them the capacity to tolerate the ambiguity of gender categories that Goldner envisions. To “stand in the spaces” between genders, to invoke psychoanalyst Philip Bromberg, or as I say, to play in the spaces: maintain reverie while also embracing the painful need to negotiate self states. How can we find this capacity within ourselves?

Perhaps playing in the spaces becomes possible when play is inclusive (of men, straight or gay, and of women, however they dress, behave or identify). When Jonathans are allowed to wear dresses and heels without being forced to be called Miranda. When unkempt rookies can be engaged — playfully, empathically — without the shaming pressure of being either a dapperly dressed man or a glamorously dressed woman and nothing in between. When play can take the form of a mellifluous dance of various bodies, minds, experiences, conflicts, and identifications, all at the same time, without having to crescendo to one abrupt, violent, necessarily definitive climax. Such a climax makes for an evocative ending to a great, thought provoking play, but as inspiration for our own lives we might look to the gauzy-lit, ambiguous, revelry, of Casa Valentina‘s Act I.

The piece first appeared in Mark’s column Quite Queerly on PsychologyToday.com.

www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-oconnell-lcsw/playing-in-the-spaces_b_5492131.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices&ir=Gay+Voices

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