Bubbling Under
For reasons probably too psychoanalytically complex to unravel, I was once obsessed with the Billboard HOT 100 chart. And I was almost as obsessed with another chart, known only to savants, called “Bubbling Under,” which listed the next ten or sometimes twenty songs that didn’t quite make the grade. These songs were Kathy Griffin, D-List material, unimportant to almost everyone except the has-beens and wanna-bes who’d recorded them. They must have attacked the mailman each week, ripping Billboard from his hands and tearing through to see if they’d been liberated from chart purgatory.
So it is with the low-wattage cases that arise, every day, because of various public and private actors’ inability or unwillingess to recognize the human beings in front of them. They’re vital to those involved, but generally ignored by even the LGBT community (never mind the general public). Two such cases, summarized in the Summer issue of Lambda Legal Impact, caught my attention this morning. In one, Dr. Robert Franke, a 75-year-old former university provost and Unitarian-Universalist minister, was turned out of his retirement home a day after he’d entered, when the paperwork from his physician arrived, revealing that Franke was HIV positive. Lambda Legal has taken the case, filing a complaint challenging this indefensible decision under a battery of state and federal discrimination and disability laws.
In another case, the Brainless-under-Bush Social Security Administration forever delayed, and then denied, child insurance benefits to one Gary Day, a disabled gay dad. With the help of a high-octane private firm (McDermott Will & Emery), Lambda Legal eventually secured the benefits — some three years after the request for them had first been made. There was never a legal argument for withholding the benefits, but that didn’t prevent the bad faith delay.
Such cases underscore the importance of the work that organizations like Lambda Legal are doing, but even their own newsletter devoted just one paragraph to each of these stories, while giving over three full pages to the reaction to Varnum v. Brien, the Iowa Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in favor of marriage equality. Were I writing Impact, I’d likely do the same thing. State-wide victories on key issues (especially marriage, these days) have enormous political, legal, and social consequences, and they keep the money coming in.
And surely marriage equality will make more difficult the kinds of literally unexplained discrimination of the Gary Days of the country. Once all citizens enjoy the same basic civil rights1, it might not even occur to whoever it was in SSA that they could deny a lawful father benefits for his children.
Marriage equality, though, wouldn’t be likely to do anything to have prevented the treatment Dr. Franke suffered. HIV discrimination, while often closely linked to anti-gay animus, isn’t the same thing. (Is Franke gay? Who knows, and why does it matter?) His mistreatment is yet another reminder that the swirl of excitement over marriage equality is just one weave of a much larger tapestry that, like Penelope’s, will never be completed.
- Yes, we still have to speak in terms of the future, amazingly. ↩
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