Focus on Lesbian Lives in Movie, If These Walls Could Talk

If These Walls Could Talk 2 focuses on lesbian lives over a forty year period, framed within a single house. This movie is an issue-driven and thoughtful drama about some of the challenges lesbians face, and the change in cultural attitudes over time towards women who love women. Women having to play a traditional role in life and not able to be themselves violate the Fourteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution. The debate over same-sex marriage is not only a moral debate but a legal debate over whether same-sex married couples should have the same legal status as opposite-sex married couples.

The first piece is set in 1961 and it opens at a theatre which is showing a screening of a movie that was extremely provocative and controversial at that time because of the suggestion of lesbianism as the theme. The scene shows two older women, watching the movie together holding hands and tears running down their faces. Listening to the group of young people behind them laughing and joking shows the viewers the discomfort this couple faces in the public’s eye. It wasn’t about just two friends seeing a movie together. It was the fact that two women were holding hands and crying. The viewer has to make the leap that if these women are at least in their sixties; they were born around the turn of the century, possibly coming out to themselves and maybe a few other women, in the twenties. These women have probably been ridicule and exposed to social scorn their entire lives. This segment sets up that the feeling of uneasiness between the couple and the society around them, but doesn’t fill in much of the history for the women. This scene shows that women can’t be women. Women were held to a certain standard and tha...

... middle of paper ...

...oral behavior, but there is a great difference between permitting states to express their moral disapproval of certain practices and permitting a state to. This would allow states to express the sentiment “we don’t like your kind.” Allowing the option of marriage for same-sex couples will encourage people to give up high-risk sexual lifestyles and have strong family values.

Aside from the technicalities of the laws in which each state has set, same sex marriage has been in debate for many years. Not allowing same sex rights as heterosexuals have is absolutely a violation of the fourteenth amendment and probably a few more down the line definitely violate The Defense of Marriage Act. Furthermore it is a bigger violation on the moral side. Since it has taken this many years to enact some laws, the years prior were denied because of morality not legality.