Bending The Arc Of History In San Francisco

Well, I'm back from San Francisco, and what an amazing week it was.  My hopes for the Supreme Court cases involving marriage equality AND for the Senate passage of comprehensive immigration reform came true.  There weren't mass demonstrations in the streets (that got saved up for the Gay Pride Parade that took place on Sunday while we were headed back to Baltimore).  But the AILA members at the conference made up for it at the San Francisco Hilton, turning the event into a three-day mass demonstration of their own.  My wife has been attending these conferences for over a decade, and she said to a number of people as well as me that she had never been to one where the energy level was as high as it was this year.

The highlight of the conference for many of us who were there was the American Immigration Council's awards banquet, an event that doubles as a fundraiser for the AIC (and a very worthy cause, I assure you).  This year's honorees focused on the LGBT community, and was hosted by a (male) performance artist with the stage name of Peaches Christ.  This is one case where a picture (taken from AILA's Facebook page), is truly worth a thousand words:



Without question, the most moving highlight was the giving of an AIC award to the first gay couple who filed a marriage-based petition for permanent residence, Richard Adams and Tony Sullivan.  They filed their petition in 1975, effectively trying to make new law and history.  Their reward was a letter from the Immigration and Naturalization Service stating that they had "failed to establish that a bona fide marital relationship can exist between two faggots."  I'm not kidding.  Those words were actually created by your tax dollars at work.

Adams and Sullivan ended up living on the run abroad, coming back to the U.S. and ultimately stepping back into the spotlight as the gay marriage debate moved to the political center stage.  Sadly, Adams died before his marriage to Sullivan could be recognized by USCIS; his portion of the award was accepted posthumously by his sister, with Sullivan at her side.  And yet, it was clear from Sullivan's speech that he understood that he and his spouse had not lived their lives in vain.  Just as it was clear to the rest of us that those who can now file marriage-based petitions, and those of us who help them do so, stand on their shoulders.

In the end, it doesn't matter what the cause is.  Progress is not an inevitability.  It does not come without sacrifice.  The status quo never yields graciously to the alternative of a better tomorrow.  But it is for that tomorrow that all of us must live, and make the most of what has been given to us.  We owe whatever happiness we have to the sacrifices of yesterday.  We can only thank the people who made them by doing likewise for those who come after us.

I hope that everyone who was with us in San Francisco during that historic week takes that lesson to heart, and makes it their life's calling.  If so, it will be better for all of us than just enjoying three days of amazing energy.  It would be tragic if we allowed post-convention politics-as-usual to discourage us, to take us off course, to imagine that we can do nothing and let somebody else fix the future.  There is no "somebody else" when the future depends on all of us.

If you take no consolation from my words, then take them from someone on whose shoulders our current President stands, Dr. Martin Luther King:  "The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice."  If you've started to bend it, keep up the good work.

And, if you haven't started, get going.  The rest of the human race needs you.