More and more Americans are being forced by the US government to emigrate because the Defense of Marriage Act will not allow their legal spouses to remain in America. Why? Because the spouses are not US citizens. For ever, the US has acknowledged, perhaps excessively, that marriage and family trump everything in immigration law. As long as the marriage is valid, and sincere, no questions are asked. Why? Because we collectively acknowledge something profound about the decision to commit legally to one other person for life, and respect it. ....
But for gay couples, it's so different. It is difficult for a government to express more contempt for a citizen's human dignity than asserting that it is completely indifferent to his or her being able to live in America with the person he or she loves.....
No other civilized Western country treats its own gay citizens this way. And yet it appears clear that the law will not change on this in the foreseeable future, as a more and more radicalized Republican party exercizes a veto over any equality for gay people, and as the Democratic party continues its defensive crouch in the face of religious intolerance and cultural panic.
This is not, in my view, a minor matter. In fact, very few issues demonstrate so starkly the inequality between gays and straights in America than this. Has any heterosexual American citizen ever doubted for a mili-second that he has a right to marry the person he loves and remain in the land he was born in? It is unthinkable. And yet what is unthinkable for 98 percent of citizens is mandatory for the tiny minority.
Monday, November 29, 2010
The Spousal Diaspora
Andrew Sullivan today
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1 comment:
It does happen very rarely to heterosexual couples and usually only temporarily. My college roommate's father, a US citizen and a widower, remarried an Iranian emigre during the US embassy takeover. She could not get a green card or visit the US until things cooled down (fortunately his permanent residence at that time was not in the US).
I suspect during the times of the anti-Chinese/Japanese immigration laws that marriages to Japanese or Chinese partners by US citizens did not necessarily allow immigration of the foreign partner (for that matter I believe if the female partner was US, she sometimes lost her US citizenship).
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