Destabilizing gender

I was sickened to read about people protesting against Pride, literally thousands marched against it in Poland. They called it the Normal Parade. Ugh.

I remember the first Pride parade I marched in San Diego twenty-two years ago. There were more protesters than marchers I think. A fundamentalist preacher from El Cajon organized it. I was even more obnoxious then and chanted at the fundies, "Two, four, six, eight, how do you know your wife is straight?"

The preacher also organized protests of abortion clinics and I did clinic defense during the worst of it. We escorted women in and out of the clinic. While all the protests were going on, a clinic got bombed so we even started guarding the clinics at night.

Political analysts say that voters who support LGBT issues also support a women's right to choose. It doesn't surprise me. Women having control over their bodies is threatening to institutionalized sexism, as is same sex marriage. It fundamentally destabilizes power relationships between men and women when women have control over their bodies. When women marry women or men marry men, it fundamentally destabilizes how gender is to be expressed in heteronormative relationships. And in heteronormative relationships, gender can be and often is about power.


Postscript: Later in the day after I wrote the blog above, I read the New York Times Magazine which did a feature article on why the Christian Right is opposing same sex marriage issue. Many of the quotes were quite illuminating and confirmed to me how integral their view of gender and the role of women is to their opposition to same sex marriage.
Here are a couple of quotes from the article:

Dobson begins his book by rooting marriage in the same biblical passage that graces the marriage shrine at the Family Research Council headquarters -- ''Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh'' -- and then goes on to add, ''With those 22 words, God announced the ordination of the family, long before He established the two other great human institutions, the church and the government.''

I found what Racer had to say on the subject of homosexuality a clear and direct summation of the views of the others Laura had invited over that night and of the other anti-gay-marriage activists with whom I spoke. ''The Hebrew words for male and female are actually the words for the male and female genital parts,'' he told me. ''The male is the piercer; the female is the pierced. That is the way God designed it.”

And they openly connect the dots between abortion and gay marriage:

In the words of Gary Bauer, president of American Values -- one of what is now a total of 61 organizations under the Arlington Group banner, with a combined membership of 60 million -- gay marriage is ''the new abortion.''

The struggles remain the same decades later, but the fundamentalists seem more organized than ever.