Celebrating Ellen Goodman as a Champion of Marriage Equality

Today marks Ellen Goodman's last column as a syndicated columnist with the Washington Post. And while columnists have come and gone throughout history, few have been as influential as Ellen Goodman, particularly on the issues of women's rights and LGBT rights. Sadly, there are too few Ellen Goodmans, and too many Michelle Malkins.

Goodman's final column today is an eloquent summary of the past four decades of the women's rights movement. Hard to believe that anyone could summarize four decades of anything, let alone one of the defining political struggles of our time. But Goodman does it deftly, saying that great progress has been made, yet too much ground remains to be covered.

"A woman is now speaker of the House, but there are only 73 women in that House and 17 in the Senate. At 60, Meryl Streep is playing a romantic lead, yet girdles have been resurrected as 'body shapers' and girls are forced into ever-more narrow standards of beauty," Goodman writes. "Young women grow up believing they can be anything they want, just don't call them by the F-word: feminist."

Now that's writing with punch. And Goodman did it well, whether she was covering women's rights, civil rights, or the LGBT rights movement, a subject she hit on frequently over the past few years in the wake of marriage equality victories in states like Massachusetts and Connecticut. There might not be another mainstream newspaper columnist out there who touched on the subject of gay marriage with such conviction and reasonableness as Goodman. And that's something that's going to be missed once she closes the reporter's notebook for good (at least as a syndicated columnist).

The best might have been in January 2004, right after the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled that the Bay State ought to legalize same-sex marriage. While the right-wing, including then Gov. Mitt Romney, retreated to freak-out mode, Goodman put the Mass Supreme Court's decision in both political and religious context.

"Maybe the whole matter of same-sex marriage would be less contentious if we didn't conflate the sacred and the secular. If we remembered that the Massachusetts Supreme Court was talking about civil marriage. If we remembered that no court can force a church to marry gay couples," Goodman wrote.

That's kind of prophetic, and an argument that later shaped some of the strategy behind marriage equality battles in California and Maine in recent years, where many marriage equality supporters tried to make the case that this was about civil marriage, not religious marriage. Indeed, gay marriage only happened in states like New Hampshire because of the sentiment behind Goodman's last line that 'no church' can be forced to marry same-sex couples.

Earlier this year, Goodman got to the heart of what hurts the most in the complex fabric that is America's gay marriage law: the fact that some states (six of them, to be exact) recognize gay marriage, while the federal government does not. That means that a lesbian couple in Massachusetts files states taxes as spouses, but files federal taxes as single people. And that sucks.

"As a side effect [of the state-by-state strategy], is producing more Americans with a strange dual citizenship: Married in the eyes of Iowa, single in the eyes of Washington. Eligible for a pension, health care, family leave in the eyes of the state; ineligible in the eyes of the feds," wrote Goodman.

Equality was never really a difficult principle to understand, and Goodman had a way of cutting straight to the chase. She did it here, too. And here. And in countless other columns over the course of the past forty years, spanning a career that started during the year of Stonewall, and ended during the year that gay and lesbian couples could get married in six states and in Tierra Del Fuego and Mexico City to boot.

(Photo courtesy of albany.edu)