As a writer, I think a lot about language, doubly so because I am also a lesbian mom at a time of raging debate over the terms used to define my family and our rights. Rather than do a traditional recap of news from 2006 to wrap up the year, therefore, I want to share a few recent articles about language and LGBT families, along with some words of wisdom from two preeminent lesbian poets and mothers. I think they are as good a way as any to inspire us for the year ahead.
In the Contra Costa Times, Mike Livingston, the known biological father of a lesbian couple’s children, answers the question “Am I their father or their sperm donor?” by saying:
The labels don’t matter. The gift involved here is not a vial of protein strands. The real gift is the one I received: a family with a pair of little girls who are profoundly fortunate to have two devoted, strong, courageous moms. My daughters have three loving parents and live with two of them. I, for one, was not so lucky as to live with even two parents for most of my childhood. I turned out OK, but my daughters have a definite advantage.
When asked “Do you have any kids?” he responds:
I’m the father of two smart, healthy, delightful daughters. They are not a political statement or a social experiment; they’re little girls, with pretty eyes and mischievous smiles. . . . They have two mommies who love them, are raising them well, love each other and keep a joyful house. It’s a happy family and I give thanks to be part of it.
That’s the answer.
Livingston has made his peace with language. Not everyone has. The right wing continues to protest the “redefinition” of marriage. As linguist Geoffrey Pullam has noted, however, the marriage debate, unlike the current debate among astronomers over whether to call Pluto a planet, is about more than mere lexicography: “The marriage issue has real consequences for people’s lives and is not just a matter of how we define a word.” In fact, as he wrote in an earlier post, the Webster’s definition of marriage is already worded to encompass both opposite-sex and same-sex marriages. “It’s nothing to do with defining the word ‘marriage’. Webster’s has done that perfectly well. It’s about a denial of rights.”
Extending the same legal rights to all couples doesn’t necessarily mean ending the language debate, though. The Boston Globe put language squarely in center stage in an article on what couples in New Jersey civil unions will call themselves:
The legal and legislative debate over the law was not about those benefits so much as it was about language.
Lawmakers considered terms such as “spousal partnerships” and “civil marriages,” and “equal benefits” before settling, as expected, on civil unions. That’s a term Vermont and Connecticut also use.
The question over language now becomes more personal than political. In its ruling, the Supreme Court wrote: “However the Legislature may act, same-sex couples will be free to call their relationships by the name they choose.”
We may have that choice, but I believe, in contrast to the Globe, that the language question will remain political until all couples have the option to get legally married and call themselves so. Evan Wolfson of Freedom to Marry elaborates:
One of the main protections that come with marriage is the word marriage, and the security, clarity, and dignity it brings to families. To be denied the vocabulary of marriage and its meaningful, resonant, and readily understood statement of love and commitment—and instead, have to fumble for 10 documents, explain a new term that doesn’t even have a verb, and, possibly, retain a lawyer just to protect your family in a time of crisis—is not fair and not equal.
My partner and I were recently married in Massachusetts, and I have struggled over whether and how to say “We’re married.” On the one hand, we have considered ourselves married for many years, and have just been waiting for the government to catch up. Why not use the term to reflect how we feel and to show that same-sex couples can marry without the world collapsing? On the other hand, when I’ve told some straight friends that we’re married, they seem to think we’ve got it all. I want people to realize our Massachusetts marriage still doesn’t carry any federal marital benefits, or any state rights outside of the Bay State, and will thus remain “marriage lite” for some time.
My dilemma rests in part upon the temporal flux of language. The words we use convey the past: all the accumulated meanings of “marriage,” “mother,” “father,” or “family,” for example. They convey the present: how we in our own ways now embody those terms. They also convey the future we want to create, a time when our relationships are fully recognized and families of all compositions are accepted.
This brings us to words of the inimitable Adrienne Rich, in a recent piece on the need for poetry today:
Poetry has the capacity to remind us of something we are forbidden to see. A forgotten future: a still uncreated site whose moral architecture is founded not on ownership and dispossession, the subjection of women, outcast and tribe, but on the continuous redefining of freedom – that word now held under house arrest by the rhetoric of the “free” market. This on-going future, written-off over and over, is still within view. All over the world its paths are being rediscovered and reinvented.
Rich is speaking of poetry, but I think much good writing shares some of that power to envision the future. In our own humble ways, those of us who write about LGBT families are giving our readers a peek at what tomorrow may be.
It seems appropriate to end, therefore, with this quote from Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider:
Each of us is here now because in one way or another we share a commitment to language and to the power of language, and to the reclaiming of that language which has been made to work against us. In the transformation of silence into language and action, it is vitally necessary for each one of us to establish or examine her function in that transformation and to recognize her role as vital within that transformation.
For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only the truth of what we speak, but the truth of that language by which we speak it. For others, it is to share and spread also those words that are meaningful to us. But primarily for us all, it is necessary to teach by living and speaking those truths which we believe and know beyond understanding. . . .
We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.
May this guide our writing and our lives in 2007 and beyond. May we find words to break the silence.
(Thanks to PageOneQ for links to the Contra Costa Times and Boston Globe articles.)