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Family Values   World Wide WTF?

Started Feb-16 by el gringo (ramseylurker); 2733 views.
Msg 1 of 45
el gringo (ramseylurker)

From: el gringo (ramseylurker)

Feb-16

Here's an opinion column about Family Values that appeared in the New York Times a dozen years ago.

It seems like a good way to kick off a thread about Family Values. 

Iowa’s Family Values
By Steven W. Thrasher
April 8, 2009
 
IF it weren’t for Iowa, my family may never have existed, and this gay, biracial New Yorker might never have been born.
 
In 1958, when my mother, who was white, and father, who was black, wanted to get married in Nebraska, it was illegal for them to wed. So they decided to go next door to Iowa, a state that was progressive enough to allow interracial marriage. My mom’s brother tried to have the Nebraska state police bar her from leaving the state so she couldn’t marry my dad, which was only the latest legal indignity she had endured. She had been arrested on my parents’ first date, accused of prostitution. (The conventional thought of the time being: Why else would a white woman be seen with a black man?)
 
On their wedding day, somehow, my parents made it out of Nebraska without getting arrested again, and were wed in Council Bluffs, Iowa, on March 1, 1958. This was five years before Nebraska would strike down its laws against interracial marriage, and almost a decade before the Supreme Court would outlaw miscegenation laws throughout the country in Loving v. Virginia.
 
When the good state of Iowa conferred the dignity of civic recognition on my parents’ relationship, a relationship some members of their own families thought was deviant and immoral, that the civil authorities of Nebraska had tried to destroy, and that even some of my mom’s college-educated friends believed would produce children striped like zebras, our family began. And by the time my father died, their interracial marriage was seen just as a marriage, and an admirable 45-year one at that.
 
That I almost cried last week upon reading that the Iowa Supreme Court overturned the state law banning same-sex marriage will therefore come as no surprise. I’m still struck by one thought: over the years, I’ve met so many gay émigrés who felt it was unsafe to be gay in so-called flyover country and fled for the East and West coasts. But as a gay man, I can’t marry in “liberal” New York, where I’m a resident, or in “liberal” California, where I was born, and very soon I will have that right in “conservative” Iowa.
 
Of course, the desire to define relational rights and responsibilities with a partner, to have access to the protection that this kind of commitment affords, is rather conservative. But it’s a conservative dream that should be offered to all Americans. Though it takes great courage for gays to marry in a handful of states now, one hopes that someday, throughout the nation, gay marriages, like my parents’ union, will just be seen as marriages.
 
It’s safe to say that neither the dramas of our family, nor its triumphs, could have been possible without the simultaneously radical and conservative occasion of my parents’ civil marriage in Iowa. And so when the time comes, I hope to be married at the City Hall in Council Bluffs, in the state that not only supports my civil rights now, but which supported my parents’ so many years ago.
 

 

 
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Msg 2 of 45 to el gringo (ramseylurker)ramseylurker 
In reply toRe: msg 1
SquaddyB

From: SquaddyB

Feb-19

Because of clowns, like you, we will, seemingly, never move on!

Your borne of the day is to hash up things that are far and deep in the past.

 
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Msg 3 of 45 to SquaddyBSQUADDYB 
In reply toRe: msg 2
el gringo (ramseylurker)

From: el gringo (ramseylurker)

Feb-19

SQUADDYB said:

Because of clowns, like you, we will, seemingly, never move on! Your borne of the day is to hash up things that are far and deep in the past.

 
 ReplyToggle Dropdown
Msg 4 of 45 to el gringo (ramseylurker)ramseylurker 
In reply toRe: msg 3
SquaddyB

From: SquaddyB

Feb-19

Tsk, tsk with the macro's.

 
 ReplyToggle Dropdown
Msg 5 of 45 to SquaddyBSQUADDYB 
In reply toRe: msg 4
el gringo (ramseylurker)

From: el gringo (ramseylurker)

Feb-19

SQUADDYB said...

Tsk, tsk with the macro's.

I don't think you even know what a macro is, SquaddyBoy.

But welcome to the Family Values thread.

 
 ReplyToggle Dropdown
Msg 6 of 45 to el gringo (ramseylurker)ramseylurker 
In reply toRe: msg 5
SquaddyB

From: SquaddyB

Feb-19

You are simply doing the same kind of crap as our learned friend RGoss does - but you are disguising it in a some what "presentable" manner. 

So how is life in sunny liberal Iowa?

 
 ReplyToggle Dropdown
Msg 7 of 45 to el gringo (ramseylurker)ramseylurker 
In reply toRe: msg 6
SquaddyB

From: SquaddyB

Feb-19

I see that the hordes of illegals are starting to resurface once more at our southern border.

I bet you're smiling!

 
 ReplyToggle Dropdown
Msg 8 of 45 to SquaddyBSQUADDYB 
In reply toRe: msg 7
el gringo (ramseylurker)

From: el gringo (ramseylurker)

Feb-19

SQUADDYB said...

hordes of illegals

This thread is not about racial slurs.

It's about Family Values.

Please do try to stay on topic.

Drop the I-Word. Don't Feed the Hate Machine
Sep 27, 2010
 
Race Forward
 
Calling people "illegals" feeds a hate machine, by exploiting racial fears and economic anxiety. The I-word, along with other words tainted by hate, provides an easy scapegoat for complex issues and OKs violence against those labeled with it. Don't feed the hate machine. Drop the I-word. 
 
 
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Msg 9 of 45 to el gringo (ramseylurker)ramseylurker 
In reply toRe: msg 8
SquaddyB

From: SquaddyB

Feb-20

LISTEN:

If I get behind the steering wheel of a car after I had a few too many jars of the black stuff - it is illegal!

If I decide to take the subway and jump the barrier - it is illegal!

If I rob a bank - it is illegal!

If I wetback it across a river and enter a country without documentation and authorization - it is illegal!

END OF!

Edited to add: Don't get all teary eyed if the truth offends you. They are ILLEGALS!

  • Edited February 20, 2021 8:24 am  by  SquaddyB
 
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Msg 10 of 45 to SquaddyBSQUADDYB 
In reply toRe: msg 9
el gringo (ramseylurker)

From: el gringo (ramseylurker)

Feb-21

SQUADDYB said...

LISTEN:

If I get behind the steering wheel of a car after I had a few too many jars of the black stuff - it is illegal!

If I decide to take the subway and jump the barrier - it is illegal!

If I rob a bank - it is illegal!

If I wetback it across a river and enter a country without documentation and authorization - it is illegal!

END OF!

Edited to add: Don't get all teary eyed if the truth offends you. They are ILLEGALS!

Look, I get it. You're upset because his parents' marriage was considered "illegal".

For them to get married in Nebraska would have been illegal. And as a result of your own racism you consider his parents as "illegals".

But what about family values?

For folks who have family values, love and marriage often goes together like a horse and carriage, no matter how many blatant and open racist epithets you so casually toss around as a diversion in an attempt to troll this forum to enforce your white supremacist ideology on my state and on my country in the 21st century.

snip--------

IF it weren’t for Iowa, my family may never have existed, and this gay, biracial New Yorker might never have been born.
 
In 1958, when my mother, who was white, and father, who was black, wanted to get married in Nebraska, it was illegal for them to wed. So they decided to go next door to Iowa, a state that was progressive enough to allow interracial marriage. My mom’s brother tried to have the Nebraska state police bar her from leaving the state so she couldn’t marry my dad, which was only the latest legal indignity she had endured. She had been arrested on my parents’ first date, accused of prostitution. (The conventional thought of the time being: Why else would a white woman be seen with a black man?)
 
On their wedding day, somehow, my parents made it out of Nebraska without getting arrested again, and were wed in Council Bluffs, Iowa, on March 1, 1958. This was five years before Nebraska would strike down its laws against interracial marriage, and almost a decade before the Supreme Court would outlaw miscegenation laws throughout the country in Loving v. Virginia.
 
When the good state of Iowa conferred the dignity of civic recognition on my parents’ relationship, a relationship some members of their own families thought was deviant and immoral, that the civil authorities of Nebraska had tried to destroy, and that even some of my mom’s college-educated friends believed would produce children striped like zebras, our family began. And by the time my father died, their interracial marriage was seen just as a marriage, and an admirable 45-year one at that.

snip--------

Frank Sinatra - Love and Marriage

 
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