Give Me Your Tired

by digby

…your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. As long as they aren’t gay.

If you missed Greenwald’s post yesterday about gays not having the basic human right to live in the same country as their partners and spouses, be sure to check it out. This is yet another little known, legal hurdle for gays and lesbians that exists purely to appease bigots.

Glenn makes the case eloquently:

[B]eing forced to choose between one’s country and one’s most central relationship — being, in essence, barred from living in one’s own country — is a grave injustice. Even under the best of circumstances, there are burdens and limitations imposed. But the point is that huge numbers of Americans in that situation — probably most — are not lucky. Quite the contrary: they are unable to live in their spouse’s country for any number of reasons, and are thus forced to live apart from the person who is most important to them, while others are forced into very risky or otherwise untenable predicaments (living in the U.S. illegally, entering sham marriages, making huge sacrifices of career, livelihood and family to live abroad) in order to be with the person they love. It’s an inhumane and discriminatory legal framework that is purely punitive, has no conceivable value or justification, and imposes profound hardship on people who have done absolutely nothing to deserve it.

Again, as always, I can’t understand why anyone thinks this is necessary. There’s nothing coercive about it, nobody is inflicting foreign “gayness” on unsuspecting heterosexuals. They just want to live their lives, work, pay taxes, shop at Target, all the usual, banal stuff that everyone else does. This kind of pointless bigotry just confuses me.

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