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While the world waits for the court’s decision on Calif.’s Proposition 8, the right to marry is about human dignity.
By Lia Shigemura, Special to the Pacific Citizen
Published February 10, 2010
It’s been many years since I served as JACL national program director. I dedicated myself to the JACL and its mission, but I left when I came out as a lesbian. After years of hearing homophobic “jokes” and comments at all levels of the organization, I knew that the good standing and respect I had earned at JACL would be at risk if I were true to myself.
Since that time, JACL has evolved on the inclusion of sexual orientation within its purview. In 1994, I testified at the Salt Lake City national convention to support the courageous stand of the Hawaii chapter and the national board for the equal rights of same-sex couples in Hawaii to be married, even as some JACLers questioned whether discrimination against gays and lesbians should concern Japanese Americans.
I said then that JACL stood on the shoulders of the brave Nisei generation and leaders like Min Yasui, Fred Korematsu and my own pioneering Nisei father, the late James Y. Shigemura. He was part of the Territorial Legislature of Hawaii and the first legislature after statehood; he retired as a Hawaii district court judge. During his lifetime of public service, he participated in many of the critical votes for equality that we Sansei, Yonsei and Gosei take for granted.
In 2004 when the opportunity first arose, my spouse Helen Zia and I were married in San Francisco in a ceremony performed by Deputy City Assessor Donna Kotake and witnessed by former JACL staff member Carole Hayashino. We held a wedding reception with our families and friends to celebrate our marriage. Although we had already been “domestically partnered” for 12 years, our domestic partnership filing never garnered much interest, let alone celebration. My father, then 88 years old, donned his judicial robes and solemnized our marriage — just as he had done at my brother’s wedding.
Sadly, our 2004 marriage was invalidated by the courts. Then in 2008, the California Supreme Court determined that “limiting the designation of marriage to a union ‘between a man and a woman' is unconstitutional” and we were legally married a second time. Soon, a hate-filled “Prop. 8” campaign again took away the rights of same-sex couples to marry like anyone else by claiming that my marriage to Helen would lead to polygamy, child molestation, bestiality, the end of the human race and a host of other demonic evils. However, Helen and I were already married and we remain one of 18,000 same-sex couples to have a legal marriage in California.
Currently there is a federal civil rights lawsuit challenging the marriage ban against couples like us, and one day discriminatory laws like these will be struck down, just as Jim Crow and other such laws were. Some anti-equal marriage people claim that domestic partnership and civil unions are the same as marriage (except, I’m ashamed to say, in my home state of Hawaii, where even the right to have civil unions has even been attacked). As a still-legally married lesbian, I can definitively say that domestic partnership and marriage are not the same.
My wife Helen and I were domestic partners and are now married — and marriage is altogether different. Not just for us, but for our extended families who were also brought together through our marriage. My father in Honolulu became the in-law to Helen’s brother Hoyt, who had lived near dad for more than a decade. After our wedding, Dad began to stop by and give fruit from his yard to his new in-law.
Our niece Emily has known me as Auntie Lia from the time she was an infant, but after Helen and I were married in 2004, she hugged me and said, “Auntie Lia, now you’re really my auntie!” For her, marriage had a powerful meaning that transcended years of love and relationship. I cried when my Auntie Nesan, then in her 90s, sent Helen and me a loving congratulatory wedding card. Her embrace of our marriage meant the world to us.
Before our nuptials, we didn’t grasp just how much marriage strengthens the bonds of family and its safety net in a myriad ways. How could we know, when we’ve had to sit in the back of the bus all our lives? We have now tasted the water at the fountain marked, “heterosexuals only,” and discovered that it is sweeter and healthier. Now that we know, we want our marriage and our family to have the same protections, privileges and responsibilities as everyone else’s.
I learned about the continuing fight for equality from JACL and the many leaders who spoke out about anti-miscegenation laws, the Equal Rights Amendment, the death penalty and the civil liberties of all people. I hope that the JACL I’ve known will continue to stand for the fundamental values and human dignity for all.
Lia Shigemura was JACL national program director from 1982 to 1986.
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