The groups overlap definitely, but I really don't want to name names of people... But I will anyway. When I wrote that, I was thinking mostly of John Aravosis and Andrew Sullivan, who are both on "Obama doesn't care about us" tours right now, and who were both vocally in the "incrementalist" category. I'm assuming that there are more people like them since they're rather influential.

About legally equal, I disagree. The entire point of hate crimes legislation and ENDA is to make us creatively unequal, that is, to make us legally unequal to make up for prejudice and hatred.

What I'm asking is whether the call "full equality now," which contains items that make us literally unequal and which won't account for inequalities within the community, shows a deep commitment to bettering the LGBT community or just a lack of patience with the list of legislation we apparently decided we wanted at some point.

I mean, there are employment protections for women and black people now, but I'm under no delusion that black people and women are treated fully equally right now.

I'm not opposing the UAFA with this post. I'm more concerned that our arguments don't take into account the complexities of immigration law and the realities that similarly-situated heterosexuals live, considering that they could be the biggest allies on this legislation.

Ok, isn't it obvious that you live in "love exile" only if you wanted stayed in your home country but, in order to be with the person you love, you had to leave it?

You see, that describes my mother perfectly. She had a masters, a career, her family, everything in Argentina, but she gave it up for my dad. She was perfectly happy to stay in Argentina and wasn't looking to move.

My brother's girlfriend who might be going to the US is similarly situated and will probably be taking a step down from her current status should she go to be with my brother, whose job is in the US (military).

Are either of them "love exiles"? Don't worry, you can talk about my mama in the abstract and I won't be offended. :)

I'm thinking about this as right now my boyfriend and I are fine. But if I pursue a career I've been wanting to for a while now, I'll have to go back to the US. And his job is here in France. UAFA or no UAFA, our problem is still there: who'll be the love exile?

Thanks, cranky queen #2. :P

I think you're confusing rhetoric/marketing with attitude. The advocates of UAFA, for example, are Americans trying to influence the American Congress on an American law. As such, they need to put it in exclusively American terms.

Actually, that does clear up a lot. If it's all a marketing campaign that we don't really believe, then I can understand it.

Thanks for commenting Rebecca. You raise two important points.

First, about the Court, I base my calculus on losing on the facts that the Supreme Court has repeatedly refused to make sexual orientation a suspect class, that the Court refused to even rule in favor of interracial marriages until a majority of states had legalized those, that the last time the Court ruled in our favor it was 5-4 and on the much less far-reaching issue of sodomy laws (in their decision they mention about 30 times that there were only 9 states with them when they ruled... do we have anywhere near 41 with same-sex marriage?) and the Court has become more conservative since then, etc.

The California court did have mostly Republican nominees, but they aren't crazy conservatives and open homophobes like Scalia and Thomas.

Anyway, there's that and the fact that pretty much every lawyer's opinion of this case that I've read, other than Boies and Olson, has been that it's ridiculous. Here's William N. Eskridge Jr. and Darren Spedale, who've studied marriage laws both in the US and abroad for years:

Also relevant to the merits of bringing the California challenge now in federal court are the long odds against success. Five of nine current Supreme Court justices are conservative Republicans. In 2000, five justices said that the Boy Scouts could exclude gay people and even struck down a state law barring such discrimination. Their reasoning was that a private group has a First Amendment interest in expressing an anti-gay identity and that the government could not censor that expression. Yet when universities asserted the same freedoms to express their pro-gay identity by treating anti-gay military recruiters differently from other recruiters conducting student interviews, a unanimous Supreme Court ruled against the universities.[...]

The bottom line is that even the moderate justices would be disinclined to require marriage equality today or even three years from now. By then, more states will have recognized same-sex marriages, but it is unlikely they will be anywhere close to a majority. Consider this parallel. In the mid-1950s, when 30 states still had laws barring people of different races from marrying, the liberal Warren Court refused to overturn this blatant race discrimination. The court did not act until 1967, when only 17 states retained such laws. So long as interracial marriage intensely divided the country, the Warren Court was not prepared to insist upon a norm of equality. Would the current moderates on the Roberts Court be any bolder? It's hard to imagine.

About "full equality now," I think that is the problem, at least that I raise here, since a lot of those people have been fully willing to throw trans people to the back of the bus in the movement, just a year-and-a-half ago. And they'll keep on doing it as queer youth homeless shelters get shut down every week in this economy while someone in the gay community is paying for two of the most expensive lawyers in the country to lose.

We're pretty much always throwing someone to the back of the bus, to borrow your phrase. And, after that list of legislation is passed, will no one be left in the back of this proverbial bus? Or will we have just polished over everything and made it seem like the battle's over?