TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

Notes From A Native Son

ADVERTISEMENT

By CLAY HARRIS Special To The Tampa Tribune

The Tampa Tribune

Published: October 5, 2008

Let's go Rays! Attending four games in a week and clanking my cowbell during the final, playoff-clinching home stand, I felt briefly seduced into feeling "at home" myself, 35 years after leaving Tampa. Not to the point of getting a mohawk, though.

Home because Tampa is where I was born and raised and where my mother, brother, sister-in-law and nephew and friends still live. But it could never be home again - and not just because the past is a different country and you can't go home again.

I left Tampa at 22 because, out of the blue, I was offered a job in London. I stayed, not just for that job and the 28-year one that followed, but mainly because I met Alan in January 1974, a few months after I arrived, and we have been together ever since.

The presence of Amendment 2, which would prohibit same-sex civil unions, on the ballot in November has led me to ponder these questions and to share my reflections.

I speak only for myself. My brief contact with the Say No on 2 campaign elicited the information that it believed the "fairness" argument wouldn't sell to Florida voters; certainly, same-sex couples are invisible in all its advertising I've seen so far.

I'm more confident about Floridians than that. I find it a source of disappointment and shame that my adopted country extends me full civil rights while my birth country does not.

For nearly three years now, same-sex couples in the UK have been able to register civil partnerships, identical in all legal rights - tax, pensions, inheritance, etc. - and responsibility to civil marriage. Nothing like this is being proposed in Florida; I cite it only to show how the civil rights and legal advantages that traditionally have attached to marriage can be independent of it. Like the Florida constitution, this is in Caesar's realm.

Civil partnerships are derided by some as "separate but equal." I accept this, but at least they are equal, backed by law forbidding discrimination in public services, where segregation never was.

Some may feel that by voting No on 2 they are "endorsing a lifestyle" of which they do not approve. I fail to see, however, how legal discrimination - denial of health benefits or visitation rights, for example - protects or strengthens any other family.

Beware, as well, unintended consequences. If Amendment 2 had the effect of forbidding employers from voluntarily extending rights to unmarried couples, as it well could be, that will only mean that jobs that could have come to Florida will go to other jurisdictions that do not discriminate. It's a competitive world.

And I suspect that it will take only one tragic story of a visiting couple who are legally hitched somewhere else - Canada, say, or several U.S. states and many European countries - being refused hospital visiting rights as a matter of law to deal a huge blow to the tourism industry. But it will be in the constitution by then and the damage will be difficult to undo.

Defeating Amendment 2 would leave matters as they are. Same-sex marriage would still be against several laws in Florida, and the federal Defense of Marriage Act - how did Bill Clinton keep a straight face when he signed that? - will still stand.

But in civil society, employers and service providers would continue to be free - without fear of vexatious lawsuits - to extend some of the practical rights attached to marriage to other couples. Perhaps some would be motivated by "fairness"; more would do it out of a practical desire to attract and retain job talent and customers from the widest possible pool.

More importantly, for those who really value family, it would mean that fewer Florida families would end up spending more time apart because children concluded that they could get a semblance of full civil rights only by moving elsewhere.

Take that from someone who my friend Norma, also an American expat in London, calls the "straightest" person she knows. That's why I draw the line at a mohawk.

Clay Harris, a Tampa native and former Tampa Times reporter, is a freelance journalist in London.

Share this:

Loading Comments...

Email Print

ADVERTISEMENT