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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
Invoking the popular will
Rep. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., said on Fox News on Feb. 15 that 60 percent of Americans oppose gay marriage. But the day before the president's announcement, the National Annenberg Election Survey released a poll showing that a plurality of Americans opposes the Federal Marriage Amendment, by a margin of 48 percent to 41 percent. Setting aside dueling poll numbers, 60 percent (or 64 percent, another recent figure) is short of the two-thirds needed in both houses of Congress and the three-fourths of state legislatures needed to ratify a constitutional amendment. To be sure, if you had a simple majority of public support in two-thirds of all congressional districts, and all members slavishly voted according to the polls, it could still pass the House. But there was a lot more than 60 percent public support for an amendment to ban flag burning, and it hasn't happened.
An effort to rush through an anti-gay amendment depends more on stoking fear than on engaging reason. The anti-gay right has long traded more in grotesque caricatures than arguments, as with the Christian Coalition videotape shown at rallies in 1996. According to author Bruce Bawer, that video "cut back and forth between idealized Hallmark card images of wholesome-looking brides and grooms ... and Gay Pride Day shots of screaming, bare-chested leathermen." One reason for the radical right's hurry over FMA may be a recognition that the more Americans are familiar with ordinary gay people, the less effective the scary images will be.
Many conservatives, to show the popularity of their position, mention DOMA and the 38 statehouses that have passed similar laws for their states. So what problem is the proposed constitutional amendment supposed to solve? Until a federal court rules the 1996 law unconstitutional, no state is required to recognize a same-sex marriage performed in another state. So even if you support amending the Constitution to resolve a social dispute, it clearly is premature right now. As The Washington Post editorialized on Feb. 13, 2004, "[A]mending the Constitution to reverse court decisions that have not been issued in cases that have not been filed is wrongheaded."
If far-right leaders were truly committed to the democratic process instead of trying to provoke a stampede, they would be content to allow different states to make their own decisions, as DOMA provides. But their real opinion of the electorate comes out when they don't get their way. Paul Weyrich, president of the Free Congress Foundation, wrote on Oct. 30, 2000: "It is already bad enough that so many uneducated, ill-informed and, when it comes to the candidates, just plain stupid, voters are going to be in that booth Nov. 7. We don't need any more of them, thank you. This Republic is fragile enough as it is."
Luckily, as with Anita Bryant and her anti-gay "Save the Children" campaign in 1977, the radical right's concerted attacks against gay families are not only energizing their base -- they are energizing gays and our allies as well.
Acknowledging that gays exist
Jonathan Rauch of the Brookings Institution writes: "Something really new, without historical precedent, is happening in America. Today, for the first time, a majority is coming to realize that homosexuals actually exist: That we're not just heterosexuals who need treatment or jail. This realization will, must, and should drive change in a society whose institutions are premised on the notion that homosexuals do not actually exist." Rauch argues: "Now that we know that homosexuals exist ... the extension of the nuptial contract to them is not a sundering of tradition but an extension of it."
Stanley Kurtz writes in National Review Online: "The real source of the challenges of gay life is the problem of sexual difference. It is terribly difficult to grow up with a different sort of sexuality than most of the world around you. Marriage does not cause this problem, and it cannot solve it." But the problem for gays is not in the difference itself but in the social stigma and legal discrimination directed at the difference. Jonathan Rauch, who has debated Kurtz on the issue, characterizes Kurtz's position thus: "I don't believe homosexuals can handle marriage responsibly. And they should never be allowed a chance to prove me wrong. Sorry, gay people, but that's life."
Gays do not need Kurtz's patronizing assurances of "compassion for the sorrows and difficulties of gays," sorrows that he seeks to perpetuate by denying our families legal recognition and protection.
This is not a purely abstract matter -- real lives are affected by treating gay families as strangers under the law. One problem that can only be rectified by federal recognition of gay relationships is that of binational couples, of which I myself am a member. Bruce Bawer, a gay American writer whose partner is Norwegian, emigrated to Norway in 1999 because that was the only way he could be with his partner. "Obviously my partner and I are far luckier than most international gay couples," Bawer writes. "His homeland recognizes same-sex unions, and I have a job I can do anywhere. Nonetheless, the stresses -- and expenses -- we've endured in order to live together legally would have torn many couples apart. The logic underlying civil recognition of marriage is that it strengthens social stability; U.S. immigration policy would seem to be driven by a sadistic zeal to destabilize gay families."
