Same-sex Marriage in Michigan: an on the ground report

I heard rumors from friends the night before, “I'm getting married on Monday, no wait, I'm getting married tomorrow.” In response to an end of the week decision by a federal judge to strike down Michigan's prohibition on same-sex marriages as unconstitutional, the Washtenaw  County Clerk Lawrence Kestenbaum decided to open the clerk's office for Saturday hours from nine to noon so that marriage certificates could be issued. As I noticed a number of my friends were planning to jump on the opportunity and tie and their respective knots I knew I wanted to be there to celebrate as well.

At five to 9:00 my family bundled up and headed down to the courthouse, we hadn't gotten a formal invitation to any weddings, but with such short notice who's to stand on formality. For a moment or two I worried that I was “being there for history” slut, but the happiness I felt for several particular friends who were now getting married made it clear to me that I was being there to celebrate my friends. When we got there at 9:05 we were met by my friend Kevin from the People's Food Co-op handing out complimentary coffees just outside the building. He said that everyone had just crowded into the lobby, so we followed on in. 

The lobby was chaotic with chatter and occasional cheers sometimes even very poor efforts at humming a couple of bars of a wedding song. Amidst the brides and brides and grooms and grooms there were children of all ages (more about them later). There was the largest group of religious leaders I've seen in quite a while, and I've never seen so many rainbow colored stoles among the religious vestments. Then there were a handful of folks like me there just to celebrate this small step forward in the march for equality, and the marriages of our friends.

Numbers between one and 50 were handed out to couples; apparently some other couples had numbers from an occasion in the fall where it looked like same-sex marriage was going to become state sanctioned. These numbers were also honored so I think the actual number of weddings today was closer to 80. Slowly couples would enter the clerk's office do the paperwork and come out with signed and sealed marriage certificates. This would garner a cheer from those of us milling in the lobby. In the space downstairs brief marriage ceremonies were sprouting like early spring flowers.

The many friends of mine who were getting married were like a tapestry of people who have woven through my life. Adrian and I lived in a co-op together many many years ago, and then again came into my life when we were both in a birthing class and our partners were each pregnant each with their first child. Beth (not my partner Beth) worked at a homeless shelter with me back in the 90s, and later we ran into her working at a car dealership when we were shopping for a new car. More recently I did some organizing around the international year of the co-op with her spouse Lisa. We became friends with Katie and Diana through mutual friends, and their daughter is a classmate of our son Teo. There was Jeannie who is one of those activists I should have meant long ago but I just met and befriended her about a year ago and now I get together with her and a couple of others once a month in a group I call the wisdom council . Zev’s teacher Peter was also getting married this morning.

There were lots of other people who I knew who were milling around included one of my graduate school professors, our families Rabbi Loren, one of the carpenters who work on my house addition, a friend I’ve known since undergrad and her spouse (already got married in Vermont they told me). It was no surprise that there were lots of families who knew Beth (my partner Beth) from Liberty Pediatrics.

My friend and Rabbi Loren told me that she had been on call all week to potentially officiate a ceremony in case the judge struck down the homophobic law and same-sex marriages became legal. It reminded me of doulas and midwives I know who are on call for births. She said that she had thought that she wouldn't have to worry about Saturday, after all the County Clerk's office is usually closed Saturdays, so she made plans which may have been a little disrupted, but she thought it was worth.

Although Zev and Teo initially came only for the first 10 minutes or so, Zev managed to return with about a half a dozen friends for his teacher Peter's wedding, and when there was a delay between the paperwork and the ceremony because Peter and his husband were waiting for their daughter to show up Zev ran down to the food co-op's to get a couple of bottles of sparkling cider.

The greatest honor I had for the day was holding one of the corners of the huppa for Carla and Adrian's wedding. They needed a tall person and they called me over from the other side of the room. The person holding the corner next to mine was standing on a chair. I suppose this says something about how formal everything was. This particular wedding was also particularly lively as their Rabbi got about half the room to chant amen at the end of several blessings. Remember this is a room that had three or four marriages going on at any one time as well as a lot of background chatter and cheering.

The best question I was asked was as part of an interview for an Internet news program. She wanted to know if I had any thoughts about the links between this the struggle for marriage equality, and the struggles to end homelessness. I had lots I could have said, but in short I said any injury to one is an injury to all this is true in the struggle for freedom and it is true in the struggle for basic resources. Expanding political equality and economic equality should certainly go hand-in-hand.

The most fun thing to watch was the daughter of my friends Katie and Diana, she was bubbling with excitement all morning, and although it was a long wait in a crowded lobby she held bouquets of flowers and seemed to continually bounce. She was not the only child of a couple getting married today, she was just a child I knew the best. I'm sure if I have been watching I would have seen similar continual enthusiasm in many of the other children milling around the lobby (in fact the only upset kid I saw was outside of the courthouse crying that he didn't want to go home).

Marriage is not always just about the couple involved, and here is where the politics of marriage become important. Love makes a family, but love is a hard thing for the state to measure. In family law marriage is very important. The suit that brought this marriage victory to Michigan was originally brought primarily as a suit for maternal rights for a lesbian co-parent. Two of my friends told me that it was marriage today and on Monday they were filing the adoption papers. Prior to today same-sex parenting couples in Michigan had to live with the fear that if the parent with legal guardianship would die or suffer severe disability the other parent could lose not just their partner but their children as well. I suspect that this was the subtext for far too many families getting married today. 

So we celebrated as we throw off this despotic past. But we are not through the ordeal yet. There are more rounds in court. I am ironically optimistic that the mostly conservative Supreme Court will support today's decision only because the state’s case for discrimination is so pathetic. Today however I raise a glass to celebrate my friends and their loving families. Congratulations one and all!

Activist Organizations and Large Group Consensus

In intentional communities and grassroots activist circles consensus is a fairly common way of making decisions. Although there are various roots of the emergence of consensus as a decision process and all the reasons for this emergence are not clear part of the picture involves the role of the Quakers in anti-war and social justice movements. The first thing I ever read about consensus was a chapter in the book Resource Manual for a Living Revolution published by New Society Press which was the publishing arm of Movement for a New Society a Quaker inspired revolutionary non-violent social change organization that emerged during the anti-war struggle of the 1960’s. I read this book in 1981 as part of an activist study group.  

During the 1980’s as I cut my teeth on student organizing and antiwar activism I took an interest in consensus process, and I learned that there were various processes some with complex algorithms and charts with countless boxes and arrows. I also learned by doing. Nearly all of the many activist organizations I was involved with used consensus of one form or another. We learned processes to facilitate consensus like fishbowls where a small group sits in the middle and discusses an issue, and the larger group looks on, any of the onlookers can trade places with someone from the inner group if they have something valuable to say.  We learned the importance of sharing of roles through Starhawk’s book Dreaming the Dark. We learned routines like checking before a decision to ask in rapid succession any blocks (to consensus), major objections, minor objections, stand asides, we learned hand signals, the wiggling of fingers often called twinkling as a way of suggesting approval or support for an idea.  All of these things helped and at times large groups of us sat through long meetings. 

The most exciting experiences I have ever had with consensus were using a process called wheel and spokes. The theory behind this approach is that consensus can work efficiently in small groups particularly if the group has some working relationship but that as groups become larger consensus becomes more unwieldy. The solution for large groups is to break into smaller groups often called affinity groups. Each affinity group can take up an issue and discuss it come to a decision then send a spokesperson to a “spokes counsel” or hub. At the spokes counsel participants can represent the views of their group and a collective agreement can be synthesized, finally the agreement can be taken back to the small groups for approval or amendment. This process can be cycled through again if needed. In practice this process can transpire considerably faster than one might think. 

My first experience of the power of this process was a protest demonstration at a weapons research laboratory. There were some 20 or 30 of us involved in occupying a laboratory that was funded by the department of defense.  We were organized into groups of about 5 or 6 people each. We had identified that the labs research was related to the nuclear arms race.  This occupation of the lab which lasted a day or two was at times stressful with upset researches, and campus security trying to pressure us out of our temporary stronghold.  I remember that we were faced with decisions that had ultimatums and we had to collectively decide in a matter of minutes we were able to do this with what struck me as lightning fast efficiency. The affinity groups were scattered in little huddles around the corners of the lab. Spokes people went back and forth from their groups to a central meeting place.  Sure 20 odd people may have been able to come to a quick consensus, but the group as a whole was notorious for long meetings with many opinions, here opinions could be voiced  more efficiently, additionally if we had met as a whole in this lab our voices would have been heard by on-looking security and researchers. maintaining some privacy around our strategy was an advantage. 

I got to watch the magic of this wheal and spokes process work on a much larger level a few years later in the desert of Nevada where thousands of protesters had gathered to protest nuclear weapons testing. Residents of this makeshift desert village were all part of, or at least supposed to be part of , affinity groups.  Our group now was more like 15 people and decisions for the peace camp as a whole were generally less urgent. Every night a spokes council meeting would convene with representatives of the many affinity groups.  We were from farther away that most of the protesters who were from the west coast.  Among the more proximal demonstrators there was a hand full of mid-level organizations. This allowed several affinity groups to have a smaller spokes circle that could again send one representative to the camp wide spokes counsel. This group was still large but manageable. Its main function was shared communication but it also made some decisions. Had those evening meetings been the camp as a whole I suspect it would have become incredibly frustrating and unproductive. Watching this process in action can be a glorious thing.

The world trade organization met in Seattle in 1999. During that meeting thousands of environmental activists and union activists and others concerned about the globalization of the economy came together for a week of street protests. This week the so-called Battle of Seattle marked a turning point in the challenge to neoliberalism. Seeing the levels of protests in the streets gave delegates from Third World countries the courage to reject the treaty agreements that were being proposed. Meanwhile the streets of Seattle filled with quite a bit of tear gas and police aimed at breaking the demonstrations. I wasn't in Seattle but my understanding is that among the activists this wheal and spokes system of consensus was used sometimes even spontaneously among street protesters faced with riot police. The accounts I heard amazed me because what they suggested was that there was a wide swath of activists from a variety of backgrounds all of whom had a working knowledge of this large group consensus process. 

I focus here on large demonstrations only because to my knowledge these events are the largest examples of quick consensus decision-making in action. The Quakers, the society of friends as they call themselves make consensus decisions among large groups but this is generally a more deliberate process over a longer period of time. My understanding is that some Native American tribes use a consensus process as well, but to the outside observer it is harder to understand. Among the traditionalist Hopis for instance, issues can be informally discussed for months with no clear marking of a final decision but when a decision is reached everyone knows about it and agrees with.

In addition to Quakers other roots to the modern popularization of consensus include anarchist and feminist activists with an analysis of power dynamics, and some indigenous communities. It is often argued that consensus leads to better and stronger decisions, that consensus results in decisions that take into account the needs of all of those who participate in the decision-making process. But in activist circles including among anarchists and feminists there are also those who are critical of consensus.  In spite of the claims that some make that consensus is more participatory, more democratic, more egalitarian the critics of consensus argue just the opposite. If you are not well-versed in consensus it can be alienating, one person can block and disrupt the whole process essentially imposing tyranny, and in a knock down drag out consensus debate power goes to the most articulate, the most charismatic, or the ones willing to wait till the very end of a very long meeting.

I had another set of consensus experiences that were important to me back in the 80s. These were decisions around the running of a cooperative household. We were young and everything was intense. We had lots of debates about things that now look trivial. For instance if we should we buy jam with the house food budget. It took me longer then I would like to admit to realize that blocking consensus was something best to be avoided. Here I would like to add what I think is perhaps one of the most important points about using consensus. Consensus works best when those using it have the maturity to use it as a cooperative process. I almost hesitate to say maturity, because that too often is mistaken with age. By maturity I mean the ability to take a broader perspective on any given decision it's not just the decision that matters but the effect of the decision and the decision process on the groups cohesion. 

I don't think that consensus is right for every group. A spirit of cooperation or at least a willingness to cooperate ought to be present. But even a spirit of cooperation does not guarantee the skills or wisdom sufficient to use a consensus process. On the other hand good consensus process has the potential of making consensus useful to a much wider array of groups and organizations.And good consensus can help to build group cohesion.