At 01:52 AM 2/15/2004 -0500 Bryon Daly wrote: >That said, while the MA SJC ruling is an amazing breakthrough, I wonder if >it will in some ways harm the gay marriage cause almost as much as help it. >The effect that the ruling is having is that it is having a polarizing >effect and getting gay-marriage opponents stirred up and prosposing >anti-gay-marriage legislation at the state level in many states and at the >national level.
I reached a similar conclusion on this issue. What follows is a response whom I wrote to my best friend, who is openly gay, who had earlier shared his thoughts with me on this issue. His thoughts are not included, so some of my references will seem a bit incongruous to you, but the key points will be easy enough to pick out. I think that it can be instructive to compare this movement with two of the other most bitterly disputed human rights movements of our time - those for African-American civil rights and for abortion. Let's ignore for a moment the absolute rights-and-wrongs of any of these issues. _The Economist_ recently, and rather convincingly, I think, argued that one of the primary reasons why The United States is essentially the only industrialized country with a robust pro-life movement is that The United States is the only industrialized country where abortion was legalized judicially rather than legislatively. The article on it is here: http://www.economist.com/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=1534731 In addition to the comparision with Europe, however, I think that the comparison with desegregation is also instructive. Despite being a very passionate and violent debate a mere 40 years ago, today desegregation is a historical anachronism in the minds of most Americans. There is no longer an impassioned pro-segregation minority in America trying to pass Consitutional amendments. And while it is certainly possible to argue that the difference between the desegregation issue - which has faded away into history and the legalization of abortion - which has produced a "war that never ends" is the relative wrongness and rightness of the positions on the two issues, I also have to believe that part of the difference is in the perceived legitimacy of the way those decisions were made. The Civil Rights Act was passed by Congress and signed into law by Lyndon B. Johnson under the authority of the 14th Amendment which was also passed and debated under the appropriate Constitutional processes. Roe vs. Wade on the other hand was handed down by an unelected judiciary via a court case the defense thought they couldn't possibly lose, and with little national debate. Thus, what I think is happening today is that a lot of people are very scared and surprised by the prospect of an unelected judiciary imposing a radical reinterpretation of the social order without the proper level of democratic debate on the subject. After all, let's face it, the primary impetus behind most of these new laws and behind all of this talk of Constitutional amendments, is the prospect of judicial decisions like those in Massachusetts. (And the one in Massachusetts seems particularly egregious in my mind because of the inherent time delays required in amending the Massachusetts State Constitution, thus creating the possibility for the ludicrous result that Massachusetts will have gay marriages for the next two years, until the State Constitutional amendment goes through - as currently seems likely.) In other words, opposition to homosexual marriage is not "being promoted as the one thing that will save our society from inevitable moral and social decay." There was no great and successful push to do so until the past year or two. Indeed, this issue hardly existed at all in the most recent Presidential Election. Rather, opposition to homosexual marriage is gaining traction in this country precisely because of the prospect that without this opposition, homosexual marriages will happen without a debate and without a vote. Moreover, I also disagree that all of this is happening because people "do not want to discuss this uncomfortable issue." Precisely the opposite, I think that people very much want this issue to be discussed in a more public forum than some distant courtroom. I'll admit that there have been Republicans on the far-right who have been proposing these laws and Constitutional amendments for a very long time - but until recently they were going absolutely nowhere. Or at least only as far as the Constitutional amendment to ban abortion. And I think I've made it clear as to why I think that has changed. Nevertheless, I think that we also need to come to grips, however, with the fact that as recent court decisions have sparked debates on these laws and Constitutional amendments that the pro-homosexual marriage side of the debate has been losing these debates quite resoundedly. A federal Constitutional amendment to ban homosexual marriage that was dead-in-the-water just two years ago now has majority support in the polls, and will likely be endorsed by an incumbent President seeking re-election in a few days. Moreover, not a single major candidate for the Democratic Presidential nomination has come out in favor of legalizing homosexual marriages nor for the Massachusetts Supreme Court decision - not even the leading candidate from its own State, nor Howard Dean, the only major candidate to vote for civil unions, and yet who rarely made it an issue. It is very clear which way the political tide is turning on this issue. Thus, right now, I can't help but think that the best case scenario for the pro-homosexual marriage side that the worst consequence of taking their fight out of the legislatures and into the Court rooms is that they create a very large and vocal anti-homosexual minority that nevertheless can never quite summon the requisite votes to overturn the status quo - i.e. analogous to the modern pro-life movement. The worst case scenario is that people react adversely to what they perceive as an undemocratic altering of familiar and popular social institutions, and actually go beyond support of the recent spate of laws (like this one in Ohio) but go all the way towards supporting various Constitutional amendments on this subject - thereby setting backwards the cause of homosexual marriages by several decades at least. JDG _______________________________________________________ John D. Giorgis - [EMAIL PROTECTED] "The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world, it is God's gift to humanity." - George W. Bush 1/29/03 _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
