Tonight I watched a very smart group of people, say very nice things about my community and then throw us under the bus. The Senate Judiciary Committee discussed gay binational families and decided while they were very heartbroken over their stories it wasn’t enough to stand up for them and include them in Senate’s comprehensive immigration reform.
As a someone who is deaf, I’ve become quite used to people talking about me as if I wasn’t in the room. I should be used to that feeling of being invisible. Turns out I am not.
Oh the Senators all had very kind words but they didn’t feel at this time they could hold up reform for 11 million people. That’s a neat way to put it. Instead of seeing the opposite that the small fraction of LGBT families affected — a mere rounding error — isn’t worth not including as long as we are at; they chose the tyranny of the majority.
Oddly when defending the 11 million immigrants, committee members invoked those hiding in the shadows just moments before rendering LGBT families to invisibility.
My own ten year relationship with a foreign born partner didn’t or couldn’t survive the wait for a solution to my inability to sponsor the man I loved. And after tonight we would still be waiting. We would continue to be invisible.
I didn’t think I would be so broken up by this betrayal of supportive Senators, especially my own senator, Chuck Schumer. And yet here I am, frustrated all over again about the lack of a solution. Waiting again for some indeterminate moment in the future when some other body — the Supreme Court or a more progressive Senate — would fix the problem that I didn’t even choose to make. All I did was fall in love with someone who happened to not be born in the U.S.
Now my heart and my relationship has been broken twice, once by unjust immigration laws and a second time by Senators asking families that I still identify with to be invisible for just a little bit longer.
Images from James and Karla Murray’s “New York Nights,” a new book of photos of a vanishing city.
