The Uniting American Families Act

Part of the nature of privilege is that huge problems in other people’s lives can remain invisible to even a good liberal. So it wasn’t until November 2007 when I for the first time met several couples afflicted by the problem that the issue of U.S. immigration law’s unfair treatment of gay and lesbian couples came to my attention. The essence of the matter is that the U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act allows U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents to sponsor their spouses for immigration purposes. So if you’re stationed in Belgium for a couple of years for work, marry a Belgian, and then want to move back to the United States you can take your husband or wife. But if you’re a man who falls in love with a Belgian man, or a woman who falls in love with a Belgian woman, you’re out of luck. If your company wants to transfer you back to the states, you’ve got a big problem.

At any rate, Jerry Nadler and Pat Leahy have a bill called the Uniting American Families Act that would address this situation. The best solution, of course, would be to let gay and lesbian couples just get married on an equal basis with other couples, thus eliminating the need for special legal workarounds for the secondary discriminatory results of discriminatory marriage rights. But that doesn’t seem to be politically realistic, and this is a small, decent step that could be taken to help relieve a severe source of pain to a lot of people who are needlessly suffering right now.