Uncle Stanley and Uncle Ronald
I feel a connection of some kind with the current Governor of New York, David A. Paterson. Recently I was in New York for about five days, easily tripling the fraction of my life that I've ever spent there. While I was there the Spitzer Sex Scandal broke, Spitzer resigned, and then Lieutenant-Governor Paterson was elevated. Bill and I watched it all on the TV with bad (cable!) reception in the breakfast room of our B&B.
Governor Paterson is in the news, and being talked about, because of his recent directive to state agencies to revise their regulations to recognize legal, same-sex marriages made elsewhere in the US. Some conservative groups are apparently manufacturing reasons to be outraged.
The New York Times says* that "In doing so, he is stepping to the forefront of an issue that has often tripped up his party nationally, and he is going further than either of the two Democratic presidential candidates have been willing to do." A bit of reporting the obvious, surely, but evidently far from self-evident. To my mind, of course, being bold and doing what's right is what will–unexpectedly, it seems–lead to success for Democratic candidates.
There are plenty of other people upset with the Governor because he sees the black struggle for civil rights and the GLBT struggle for civil rights simply as groups of people looking for respect and equality. Tsk.
In the interview, Mr. Paterson said he believes deeply that gay men and lesbians today face the same kind of civil rights battle that black Americans faced. He acknowledged that this position put him at odds with some black leaders, who bristle at such comparisons.
“In many respects, people in our society, we only recognize our own struggles,” Mr. Paterson said. “I’ve wanted to be someone in the African-American community who recognizes the new civil rights struggle that is being undertaken by gay and lesbian and transgendered people.”
It is a truism in the LGBT community that visibility, living out, is the single most important thing individuals can do to help achieve equality. Whether that's what brought Governor Paterson to his early enlightenment we don't know, but it sure doesn't seem to have hurt:
When David A. Paterson was growing up and his parents would go out of town, he and his little brother would stay in Harlem with family friends they called Uncle Stanley and Uncle Ronald.
Uncle Stanley and Uncle Ronald, he said, were a gay couple, though in the 1960s few people described them that way. They helped young David with his spelling, and read to him and played cards with him.
“Apparently, my parents never thought we were in any danger,” the governor recalled on Thursday in an interview. “I was raised in a culture that understood the different ways that people conduct their lives. And I feel very proud of it.”
We note that it's all said without scare-quotes around the word 'uncle'.
We hear how the Governor talks about "the civil rights struggle", an idea that embraces all citizens.
Mr. Paterson said he does not see his support for gay marriage as an issue of political fortitude, but rather something more human and almost reflexive.
“All the time when I’d hear Uncle Stanley and Uncle Ronald and my parents talk, they were talking about the civil rights struggle,” Mr. Paterson said. “In those days, I knew I wanted to grow up and feel that I could change something.”
For that we can all thank Uncle Stanley and Uncle Ronald.
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*Jeremy W. Peters and Danny Hakim, ("How Governor Set His Stance on Gay Rights", New York Times, 30 May 2008.