Despite my criticism of effete journalists, I frequently find myself paging through the New York Times magazine on a lazy Sunday afternoon.
Sue me.
This week was no exception, and I was rewarded by stumbling across an interesting interview of Edith Windsor, the lesbian widow challenging DOMA in the Supreme Court.
An excerpt
You have said that you were never active in NOW or the women’s rights movement. Why not?
The first thing they did was try to get rid of the lesbians in the organization. They said it was ruining how they looked. They were really separatists. There was so much negative male talk, and the men in my life were nice people.
Did you come to consider yourselves feminists?
Not really.
We’ve seen these ironic stories before. We know the anti-immigration movement had roots in environmental/population control, and that the abortion business had early ties to eugenics. And, though we might have figured they were guilty of misandry, the feminist movement was, according to Windsor, also anti-gay. Who knew?
Now days, people on both sides of the ideological spectrum tend to get browbeaten into submission — forced to accept all the dogma of their “side,” whether they agree, or not. So it’s refreshing to see someone who has refused to be completely co-opted.
Windsor seems to be a pretty remarkable woman. Read the whole thing here.