This one is from the Gay News website washblade.com:

[
size=18]OPINION[/size]

Gay Americans ‘resident aliens’ (Gay)The immigration debate is the perfect time for gays to demonstrate an allegiance with other minorities.

By REV. IRENE MONROE
Thursday, May 18, 2006


BEING BORN IN this country does not give you full citizenship rights. Nor does being born in this country guarantee you life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

People who enter this country without proper documentation are called illegal aliens. But those of us who are born here and are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer, women, or people of color are all treated as resident aliens.

America has always maintained a separate and unequal society for some of its own, and there is no greater moment for the gay civil rights movement to shed light on America’s hypocrisy concerning full U.S. citizenship rights than through the issue of immigration.

Very little separates these gay Americans and undocumented immigrants when it comes to marriage equality, adoption rights, housing, health and labor. And through the immigrations challenges faces faced by binational gay couples — an American with a non-American same-sex partner — we see perfectly how our plights our inextricably bound.

FULL CITIZENSHIP RIGHTS have always escaped marginal and disenfranchised groups in this country, and full citizenship has always been the litmus test of how invested America is in having a multicultural democracy.

America’s investment in that ideal has always been anemic when it comes to its gay citizens. Take marriage, for example.

Just as federal laws in this country do not recognize unions between U.S. citizens and their non-citizen same-sex partners, neither do these laws recognize the union of two queer U.S. citizens, unless you reside in Massachusetts, and then it’s only recognized by the state.

But Massachusetts has its own reinforced borders when it comes to same-sex unions. With the recent reaffirmation of a 1913 law originally intended as a color line to prohibit interracial couples from coming into Massachusetts to marry, those same-sex couples who do not reside, or have no plans to reside, in the Bay State cannot come here to legally marry.

And then there is the issue of housing rights for gays and immigrants, both of which face the “there goes the neighborhood” syndrome. We are all too familiar with classic tales of Negrophobia — past and present — when one black family moves into the neighborhood and white flight takes hold.

America has always feared the browning of America, so too does this country fear the gaying of America.

It’s one thing to have gay bookstores, gay bars, gay neighborhoods, and even a couple of gay families worshiping in straight churches and attending seminaries, but for many the boundaries were pushed too far and borders had to be erected when the Episcopal Church consecrated a gay bishop, Rev. V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire.

And the Catholic Church would rather shut its doors, like it did to gay adoption, than allow open gay priests to serve.

DESPITE THE SIMILAR plight faced by illegal immigrants and gay citizens, it’s not so clear whether these two communities will work together in getting America to open its borders, real and artificial.

Certainly the two communities are not mutually exclusive, as evidenced by the recent by Human Rights Watch and Immigration Equality entitled “Family Unvalued: Discrimination, Denial & the Fate of Binational Same-Sex Couples Under U.S. Law.”

But it is not so clear if the larger LGBTQ community sees this as their issue. And I worry that if gays in general do not see immigration reform as part of a larger struggle for full citizenship rights in this country, then gay rights groups will once again face resistance from people of color when pushing their marriage equality agenda.

Mainstream gay groups historically have not done well in the area of coalition building with other marginal populations, inside and outside geographical and ideological borders. And efforts to reach out to communities of color have been anemic or nonexistent.

There is no better time than now to build wider support in our struggle for full citizenship rights than on the issue of immigration reform. And if we don’t embrace this issue, then we will have become the obstacle to our own civil rights.