Proposition 8 passed in California, and it bothers me. It often seems that with many legal issues, as goes California, so goes the rest of the country. I wonder why more people can’t see this issue for what it is, a civil rights issue.
In particular, why can’t more people of color – Latinos and blacks voted overwhelmingly in favor of Proposition 8 – see this as a civil rights issue? Many members of these minority groups seem perfectly willing to accept the benefits provided them by the hard work and sacrifices of the Civil Rights Movement but unwilling to extend those benefits to others who are similarly oppressed.
Me? I say it’s just bigotry. Because, in the purest sense of the term, recognizing the equal right of people in a same sex relationship to marry is a CIVIL rights issue.
The newspapers and news websites tell us that it was religion that swayed slightly more than 50% of Latino voters and 70% of African-American voters in California. Many African-American ministers and Catholic priests with Latino congregations pushed Proposition 8 from the pulpit.
But who cares what your religious views are? This is not a religious issue. No one is asking for the right to get married in your church by your minister, priest, rabbi, or imam. The civil act of marriage does not require the blessing of any such person. It requires only the imprimatur of the state. Same sex couples simply want to be granted the same CIVIL RIGHT to inheritance. The same CIVIL RIGHT to joint ownership of property. The same CIVIL RIGHT to marital tax treatment. The same CIVIL RIGHT to healthcare and retirement benefits for their partners and children. They’re not asking for God’s blessing; they’re asking for the government’s.
And the government should give it. It’s called “equal protection,” and it’s guaranteed by Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which provides: All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Be bigoted in your religious practices if you want, but the government should not practice bigotry when recognizing and protecting the rights of its citizens. (And, incidentally, thanks to the Second Amendment, you’re perfectly free to practice your bigoted religion.)
And people just need to get over the idea that granting people who live a lifestyle that is distasteful to them the same rights somehow cheapens their rights. There are lots of things that are morally offensive to various people but are nonetheless sanctioned by the government. Simply because someone finds an act morally offensive doesn’t mean that act should lack constitutional protection. Mores can change over time and should not interfere with the recognition and protection of constitutional rights.
In the earlier years of this country, many people (if not most people) found it morally reprehensible for people of different races, particularly blacks and whites, to intermarry. Until the mid-Fifties, miscegenation was illegal in most states. At the marriage license office, interracial couples needed not apply. Then, in 1967, came Loving v. Virginia, the case in which the Supreme Court declared that – regardless of public opinion about the morality of such unions – marriages between people of different races was constitutionally protected by the 14th Amendment. So, you may not approve of such unions; you may even find them distasteful; but they’re legal.
Personally, I don’t approve of crackheads having babies (and find it morally reprehensible for someone to expose a fetus to crack cocaine), but when one does, she has the same CIVIL RIGHT to custody of her child that I have of mine. I certainly wouldn’t deny her the right to have her parental rights terminated only after notice, an opportunity to be heard, and proof of her unfitness. It doesn’t cheapen my parental rights in the least to grant those rights to people I feel engage in reprehensible conduct. In fact, it strengthens my rights. We shouldn’t head down the slippery slope of denying some people – but not all people – access to their constitutional rights.
The issue is no different for people in same sex relationships who want their right to marriage recognized and protected.
It is both the wonderful and sometimes frightening reality in this country that you are free to think whatever you want; you are free to say just about anything you want; and you are free to practice your religion as you please. As a result, you are free to think that it is morally wrong for people of the same sex to marry; you are free to say that you think it’s morally wrong; and your church is free to deny religious rites to persons of the same sex.
None of us, however, is free to deny other citizens equal protection of the law. If you, in your happy heterosexual home, are entitled to the governmental extension of marital rights, so are all the people in same sex relationships. It is a CIVIL RIGHTS issue.
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3 comments:
It's plain as day. Thanks.
Very well said! I am glad you posted your thoughts on this issue because I was wondering if I would have to do so. :) I shared the sense of hope and change Obama's election brought, but when I read about the passage of the anti-gay amendments, my view of the election's results darkened. Throwing out an incompetent president whose ideologically blinkered manner of governance led to net harm for the nation and the world is a good thing, but the demands of justice take priority in my mind over utilitarian social goods. While more wealth for more people, a cleaner environment, racial amity, health care, etc., are better things to have that not to have, the deprivation of a minority group of a basic civil right is a moral issue that takes precedence over these issues. The latter cuts at the very root of political liberty.
The doctrine of equal protection seems so fundamental to American political liberalism (in the classic philosophical sense, not the right-left political sense) that I wonder sometimes if the passage of propositions like this one is more a matter of ignorance as to how the Constitution structures our government than it is of genuine ideological disagreement. I think when many people see something on a ballot stated in such general terms (Should marriage be between one man and one woman?), they incorrectly read it as a referendum on their own view of morality, rather than an issue of the limits of political liberty. I imagine many offensive incursions on our freedoms could pass a vote in such a way. E.g.: Should God be worshipped? Should people be married before having children? (this one is coming, I think, as a part of the anti-gay effort) Should people give to charity? Should people smoke or drink? etc.
I have believed for a long time that the opponents of gay civil rights covertly approve a noxious political doctrine of sectarian supremacy that the nation as a whole would reject, and which moreover the framers of the Constitution did already reject in the explicit terms of the founding document itself. Sectarians' (like the Mormon church's) political success therefore depend on rhetoric and confusion more than on reasoned argument. Would a majority of Americans vote to repeal the First Amendment (or some other quintessential statement of liberty)? I don't think so, but a right-wing sectarian minority certainly would. That minority has to confuse or manipulate another sizable segment of the voting population in order to do so, and they succeeded in California.
They succeeded temporarily in California. Prop 8 is being challenged on multiple grounds in at least 4 lawsuits. There are a number of reasons for the challenges ((i) inconsistency with equal protection in both the California and federal constitutions, thus producing an incoherent document for instance; (ii) procedural propriety of determining constitutional rights enshrined to protect minorities by popular vote for another) but that all revolve around the same concept, defined at least 2500 years ago or so by Socrates, that rule by the majority or "mob rule" produces injustice.
It is my hope that our legal system will restrain the manipulated general population here. Can you imagine if the proposition of "black people and white people should not marry" had been put on the ballot back in 1950... or even 1980? 1990? What do you think the result would have been? (Thankfully, the Supreme Court took up that particular issue and shut the door on miscegenation-based discrimination).
It is no surprise that people do not understand the Constitution and government, since all we teach our kids these days is how to pass a math test. Or "intelligent design" versus evolution.
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