WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT. “I know we have very serious things to deal with today, but sometimes girls just want to have fun.” When Karine Jean-Pierre, spokesperson for the White House uses the words of her most famous and sung song to introduce Cindy Lauper on the podium of the press room, the feeling is that the direction of the day has left nothing to chance.
One of the iconic and rebel singers of the 80s, an activist for the rights of homosexuals, spoke for a few minutes in front of journalists and thanked Biden and all the democratic leadership who made the signing possible (which will take place a few minutes later on the South Lawn of the White House) of Respect for Marriage Act, the federal law for the protection of same-sex marriages. “Tonight we can rest easy because our families are recognized,” says Cindy Lauper.
USA, Congress approves a law in defense of equal marriage
EASTER FORTY
Meanwhile, the South Lawn fills up, the sky is blue, the sun is shining and the air is prickly. The colors of the party dominate the lawn of the White House squeezed between the presidential mansion and the Washington obelisk. Young couples, girls, older people, are the people who mobilized to reach a goal that Biden has set since the beginning of his presidency and which became urgent when the Supreme Court removed the right to abortion leaving it to the will of the States. The new law intends to safeguard same-sex marriages if the Supreme Court overturns the 2015 Obergefell versus Hodges law by which same-sex unions were legalized nationwide. Among other things, the new law also protects interracial marriage. In 1967, the Supreme Court overturned laws in 16 states that prohibited them in Loving v. Virginia.
Cyndi Lauper embraces Chuck Schumer, Majority Leader of the United States Senate, and Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House
At the White House it is a day of celebration, a law is rarely signed in front of 5300 guests, the general staff of the institutions and of the two parties and VIP guests. Sing Cindy Lauper (True Color) and before her a touching Sam Smith (Stay with me), in the moments of detachment, the loudspeakers relaunch great classics, soundtracks that have marked the long march of the claims of the LGBTQ community.
Charles Schumer, Democratic leader in the Senate, also spoke before the president, joking: “I’m wearing the purple tie I wore to my daughter’s wedding to a beautiful woman.” Then he announces that his Alison is expecting her first child. Nancy Pelosi, much applauded, thanks the activists for your “impatience, persistence and patriotism”. Kamala Harris comes out of the shadow cone into which she has slipped in recent months, it was she who celebrated the first gay wedding in California in the early 2000s, she remembers it and the applause is abundant. Testimonies alternate on stage, there is the president of the Human Rights Campaign Kelley Robinson and the owner of the Q Club, the gay club targeted by an attack in November. She then it’s up to Biden.
This president is the symbol of an America that has made a breakthrough on the recognition of gay marriage. In 1996 Biden, then a Delaware senator, voted in favor of the Defense of Marriage Act (Doma) which certified that marriage was only heterosexual. Clinton signed the law, the result of a laborious compromise, at midnight, away from cameras and embarrassment. The climate in America was beginning to change.
Biden was also the initiator of Obama’s public breakthrough: in 2012 he went to Meet The Press and during the interview he sided, surprisingly, in favor of gay marriage. Three days later Obama, who until then had not expressed himself, followed suit.
In 1996 when Clinton signed Doma, 27 percent of American adults supported gay unions, according to a Gallup poll; in 2012 these had become half and in 2021 71% claimed that a law was needed to recognize gay unions.
At the ceremony on the South Lawn, fragments of that interview were broadcast to introduce the president’s speech which reiterated the need to protect every family and the freedom of individuals. “You don’t have to ask yourself what marriage is, but who do you love,” he said. He then denounced the laws of some states where conservative policies on gender issues proliferate: “Some states target transgender children, terrorize families and criminalize the doctors who take care of them”. But the president reserves the hardest thrust to the “extremist” Supreme Court.
“Racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia and transphobia are all connected. But the antidote to hatred is love », closes the president before signing the law and pausing for selfies, compliments, pats on the back on a day that is already historic for the LGBTQ community but which, as Biden said, “it counts for all of America, because it says who we are as a nation.”