Some readers may know that my own legal marriage in Massachusetts five years ago made no difference whatever to my ability to become a permanent resident, because of my HIV status. The HIV ban is now history (thanks to Bush and Obama). But it's worth recalling that if I had married a woman instead of a man, my marriage license would have trumped the HIV ban immediately, granting me an automatic waiver for permanent residence. When Jesse Helms and then Bill Clinton put the HIV ban into law, they exempted the married and heterosexual. The reasoning was the same as it is for general US immigration policy: family trumps everything. The US government does all it can not to split up immediate families in immigration law. But when it comes to gays and lesbians, we have no recognized family under federal law since DOMA, and therefore bi-national couples are literally strangers to one another in the law.

Readers may recall my time in London fundraising for Immigration Equality earlier this year (I am on the board). At one meeting that was filled with same-sex couples doomed to divorce by deportation, or joint emigration, I looked out at a sea of eyes. The intensity of the pain was a little too much to bear, because I remembered it so well. To fall deeper in love, knowing there is no security for the future at all; to put down deeper roots in the knowledge that one day, they may have to be uprooted; to see your relationship have an expiration date on a visa; to have HIV actually stamped in code in my passport as a final stigma; to stand in separate lines if we re-entered the US, since gay couples were deemed a particular immigration risk, since the USCIS understandably assume that couples in love might be tempted to overstay visas.

Yesterday was the first legal step to ending this injustice. Glenn Greenwald highlights a new lawsuit (pdf):

[T]housands of U.S. citizens are barred from living in their own country with their same-sex spouse. The “luckiest” among them are able to move to their spouse’s country, but that’s a choice available to only a small percentage: for that to work, the foreign spouse’s nation must grant immigration rights to same-sex couples (only a minority of countries do) and the American partner must be able to find work while living outside the U.S.