Next week the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a consolidated same-sex marriage case. Should the decision go our way, LGBT couples in all 50 states will finally be granted the right to marry. If that happens, there are other issues that the community must focus on. One of those is women's rights; in particular, it's time for gay men to stand with their lesbian and straight female sisters on income inequality and reproductive rights. Right now solidarity is missing, especially supporting heterosexual women.
We must not forget – and for those too young you should ask your older gay friends – that at the height of the AIDS epidemic more than 30 years ago, it was women – gay and straight – who came to the aid of countless gay men as they suffered from the terrible complications of a ravaging disease, often with no family support. And it wasn't only the women who worked as nurses or in other health care professions who stepped in to fill the void. Other women cooked meals, took them to appointments, donated blood, and held their hands at the end.
No one during those traumatic years could have imagined that decades later we'd be on the verge of achieving the radical idea of same-sex marriage. Again, especially in California during the fight over Proposition 8, the same-sex marriage ban, it was straight women who supported us.
Despite our progress, there are new threats to our community. The Religious Freedom Restoration Acts in Indiana and Arkansas were initially written to allow business owners to discriminate against LGBTs. The governors of those states quickly backtracked when business and political leaders came out strongly against the laws, causing them to be revised. But these types of laws also can be used to limit access for reproductive choice or anything that can be argued to conflict with one's religious freedom. Even some states that allow same-sex marriage are working to restrict women's rights. In Arizona, as New York Times columnist Gail Collins recently wrote, the Legislature passed a bill that requires doctors who perform drug-induced abortions to tell their patients that the procedure may be reversible, when in fact most scientists say it isn't.
As Collins wrote, "The nation is becoming more rational about gay sex and more irrational about heterosexual sex. Who could have thought?"
Income inequality
Income inequality must be made a priority. Studies show straight women earn on average 63 cents for every $1 a straight man makes. Interestingly, according to a study by the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law, lesbians generally outperform their straight counterparts even though they, along with gay men, experience more workplace discrimination.
The study suggests that lesbians may feel less constrained by the dominant culture's expectations about the way women are supposed to be, "freeing them to consider better-paying, male-dominated fields at higher rates than other women do," according to a story on Slate.com.
But when considering earning power, the Center for American Progress says, lesbians are still far more likely to be poor than either straight women or the general population. Slate's Vanessa Vitiello Urquhart notes that the CAP analysis goes on to explain this is "particularly true for older lesbians, lesbians of color, and lesbians who are raising children." Of course, this vulnerability increases in states that lack employment protections for LGBT workers. Even in the state Capitol, a recent Sacramento Bee analysis showed that staff members who are women make 92 cents on the dollar compared to men in the Assembly, and 94 cents on the dollar compared to men in the Senate.
The situation is worse for transgender people, who typically experience severe underemployment. It was only in recent years that the Human Rights Campaign, the country's largest LGBT rights organization and one that is mostly identified with gay men, started advocating for trans equality.
The point is, we're all in this together. And at a time when men in Congress and state legislatures are deciding what's best for women or holding hearings on women's issues without including female speakers, gay men could do more to support women, gay, straight, and trans. We may win marriage equality, but workplace discrimination still exists, and equal pay for women is a pipe dream.