--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The motion is adopted. Outgoing Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi had reason to be excited this week.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): And an activist we spoke to said maybe marriage has been sucking the oxygen out of the room for like a few decades now.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: All that and more ahead on Today Explained. Support for Today Explained comes from Saks Fifth Avenue. Fall is here. Might be time to find some nice new pieces you can wear again and again.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today explained December 2022. This year will be remembered for the Dobbs decision that came out of the Supreme Court of the United States, the one that overturned Roe v. Wade.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And in his concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas argued the court shouldn't stop 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That freaked out a lot of Americans and a lot of politicians who thought this was settled law.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And some of them, including Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, decided to do something about it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And this week, Congress passed the Respect for Marriage Act, though he spoke with the senator last week when it passed the Senate.
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: 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.
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: There's an open invitation that's been issued by Clarence Thomas to relitigate marriage equality.
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: 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.
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: And basically saying that the federal government would not be forced to recognize same-sex marriages should any state approve it.
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: 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.
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: 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.
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: For those who might want to be married in the future. Sadly, it does not force every state to allow same-sex marriages.
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: 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 state.
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: It's a critical piece of legislation moving forward. Should the court ever reconsider Obergefell.
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: You called this a humble piece of legislation, which I think means it doesn't do as much as you maybe wished it did.
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: What did this fall short of doing, the Respect for Marriage Act?
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: You know, it turns out that it is very, very complicated to codify a decision like Obergefell.
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: And I'd love to also give the analogy of the comparison between this in the interracial marriage case back in 67 called Loving v. Virginia.
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: 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.
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: Today, zero states still have those laws on the books.
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: But it took until the year 2000 for the last state to repeal its ban on interracial marriage.
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: Meanwhile, because of the Loving v. Virginia decision, it was legal everywhere and they were recognized everywhere.
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: But the states took that long to go back and review their statutes.
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, many states, including my home state of Wisconsin, had never repealed their criminal abortion bans.
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: Ours dates back to 1849.
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: Now, jettison to the same marriage discussion today 35 states have either statutory or constitutional bans on same marriage.
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: 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.
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: And frankly, that's why we need the insurance of the Respect for Marriage Act.
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: What we were unable to do in this law is repeal or alter state constitutions, repeal laws in the 50 states, right?
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: You can't do that from the federal level.
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: So you're saying you couldn't comprehensively legalize same-sex marriage.
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: Exactly.
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: And plus, we regulate marriage and oversee marriage at the state level.
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: I think it's easy to look at the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996 next to the Respect for Marriage Act in 2022 and see progress in this country.
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: At the same time, you only got support from 12 Republicans.
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: What were the rest of them saying when they told you, I can't back this bill?
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: My Republican colleagues, they were hanging their hat on different excuses, if you will.
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: 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.
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: 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.
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: There were a lot of assertions made, again, falsely, that this somehow impinged religious freedoms.
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: It doesn't. It's a status quo. The base bill was status quo.
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: But some of my Republican colleagues felt that they needed clarity, that they needed questions answered.
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: And the way in which we addressed those questions got the support of a dozen Republican colleagues.
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: But frankly, others just didn't come on board.
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: 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.
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: What gives there?
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: 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.
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: And Obergefell never created that pressure.
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: 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.
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: But the Church of Latter-day Saints was, I think, very sincere in their discussions with proponents of the Respect for Marriage Act.
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: And they were also interested in the clarity of making sure that we're talking about marriages between two people, not polygamous relationships.
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: Once those issues were addressed, yes, indeed, we won the support of the Mormon church, some of the entities representing evangelical churches, Orthodox Judaism.
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: 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.
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: Help me square what you all have accomplished in Congress with what's going on in the states right now.
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: 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.
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: It feels like federally we're moving in one direction, and then in some states we're moving in the exact opposite direction.
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: 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.
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: It's been so disheartening to see the sort of legislative attacks that our transgender community is facing.
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: And of course, we have to stand together and fight these pieces of legislation.
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: And I will tell you that the rhetoric is also present on Capitol Hill.
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: 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.
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: 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.
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: 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.
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: But this week, with 61 votes, we were able to pass the Respect for Marriage Act.
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: We have a lot further to go with regard to true equality and true equity for the entire LGBTQ community.
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: And do you think it's only a matter of time?
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: I think that one of the things that is proven is that as people see us and know us, that hearts and minds change.
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: And that has to continue to happen.
--:-- Senator Tammy Baldwin: Visibility is key to creating change and to creating progress.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You're listening to Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Is it Today Explain or Try Explains?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Explain da. Explain da.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: LGBTQ activist Kenyon Farrow was happy to see the Respect for Marriage Act get through Congress, but not, like, over-the-moon happy.
--:-- Kenyon Farrow: In fact, I've been feeling ambivalent about this country's fight for marriage equality for a minute now.
--:-- Kenyon Farrow: Well, for many years, in the kind of first decade of the 2000s, I was one of the loudest, you know, kind of critics of the same-sex marriage movement coming from within the LGBT community.
--:-- Kenyon Farrow: 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.
--:-- Kenyon Farrow: You know, one of the critiques, you know, that I have had and a lot of other 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.
--:-- Kenyon Farrow: 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.
--:-- Kenyon Farrow: So if you weren't fighting for marriage, funders were reticent to fund your work.
--:-- Kenyon Farrow: I worked for an organization in New York City 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.
--:-- Kenyon Farrow: And after marriage became legal in New York state, the organization ultimately closed because there wasn't funding to do that kind of work.
--:-- Kenyon Farrow: About a year or two later, the state equality organization, Empire State Pride Agenda, closed its doors.
--:-- Kenyon Farrow: The initial response from funders was just to not fund because marriage had passed.
--:-- Kenyon Farrow: So obviously LGBT people couldn't possibly have other sort of policy needs for a statewide organization to advocate on behalf of.
--:-- Kenyon Farrow: 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.
--:-- Kenyon Farrow: 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.
--:-- Kenyon Farrow: Around, we're just like everybody else too. We're just white suburban dads, you know, trying to raise kids, right?
--:-- Kenyon Farrow: And so there are all these ways in which the fight for same-sex marriage definitely pulled resources out of other LGBT work.
--:-- Kenyon Farrow: 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, you know, just were not seen as important.
--:-- Kenyon Farrow: Generally, in American society, people are getting married less and not more.
--:-- Kenyon Farrow: 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.
--:-- Kenyon Farrow: One example that, you know, I've used a lot over the years is, you know, what about the Golden Girls?
--:-- Kenyon Farrow: The Golden Girls? Like the TV show?
--:-- Kenyon Farrow: Absolutely. The Golden Girls, a TV show.
--:-- Kenyon Farrow: I like you and I like cats. I also happen to have a room for rent and the name is Blanche Devereaux.
--:-- Kenyon Farrow: Hear me out. So part of what what what I'm saying is fewer people are getting married or fewer people are staying married for their entire lives.
--:-- Kenyon Farrow: 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.
--:-- Kenyon Farrow: 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.
--:-- Kenyon Farrow: So what do we do with, you know, households like that, right?
--:-- Kenyon Farrow: 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.
--:-- Kenyon Farrow: 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.
--:-- Kenyon Farrow: We live together. We should be able to file jointly as a household, et cetera.
--:-- Kenyon Farrow: That isn't about, you know, whether or not you, you know, won at the dating game, essentially.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Sounds like you've been advocating for this for decades. Is it not going well?
--:-- Kenyon Farrow: Well, actually, when I explain it to people that way, people get it, right?
--:-- Kenyon Farrow: I've had this conversation with, you know, 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?
--:-- Kenyon Farrow: But I think... Why aren't we doing it? Why aren't we doing it?
--:-- Kenyon Farrow: Is it because it's kind of harder to define some of these less traditional household relationships?
--:-- Kenyon Farrow: 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?
--:-- Kenyon Farrow: 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.
--:-- Kenyon Farrow: 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.
--:-- Kenyon Farrow: I do think that for some people in the LGBT community, having the marriage piece in a homophobic society says on some level that, 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 kind of way.
--:-- Kenyon Farrow: 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 keeping it that way and just allowing for themselves as a gay person, as a lesbian or whatever, to be in that institution.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Does the fact that there's bipartisan support for the Respect for Marriage Act in Congress mean that we've actually made progress here and that might benefit the progress that you'd like to see?
--:-- Kenyon Farrow: I do think that the bipartisan support does show some sort of social progress.
--:-- Kenyon Farrow: 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.
--:-- Kenyon Farrow: And we had Proud Boys show up armed at a drag queen story hour for kids and shut it down.
--:-- Kenyon Farrow: The event was canceled after the Ohio chapter of the Proud Boys, which is an extremist organization, announced they planned to protest the event.
--:-- Kenyon Farrow: More than 50 members of the Proud Boys still showed up to the canceled event to protest.
--:-- Kenyon Farrow: 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.
--:-- Kenyon Farrow: 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.
--:-- Kenyon Farrow: 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?
--:-- Kenyon Farrow: 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 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 uh you know, kind of household dynamics or relationships.
--:-- Kenyon Farrow: The Golden Girls is the easiest sort of example that everybody knows.
--:-- Kenyon Farrow: 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.
--:-- Kenyon Farrow: People often live together. You ever consider joining a house?
--:-- Kenyon Farrow: What do you mean?
--:-- Kenyon Farrow: Well, a house is the family. You get to choose.
--:-- Kenyon Farrow: I'm a house mother.
--:-- Kenyon Farrow: There's a range of different household configurations in this country that we just don't talk about.
--:-- Kenyon Farrow: 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.
--:-- Kenyon Farrow: When in fact, most people are actually living their lives in beautifully constructed ways that have nothing to do with Ozzie and Harriet.
--:-- Kenyon Farrow: And those folks deserve the ability to legally protect their relationships and their families as well.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We were produced today by Siona Petros, edited by Matthew Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Paul Robert Mounsey.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The rest of our team includes Victoria Chamberlain, Hadi Mawagdi, Halima Shah, Amanda Llewellyn, Miles Bryan, and Avishai Artsy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We used music by Breakmaster Cylinder and Noam Hassenfeld, and had a little extra help from Patrick Boyd on the ones and twos this week.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today Explained is on the radio in partnership with WNYC and we are part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
