Let’s Take Marriage Back
Tuesday’s election is over, now, with liberals, activists, and the Obamaniacs congratulating themselves on a “world-changing victory.” Yet, there is rain on their parade. Across the country, people are scatching their heads and wondering what went wrong on California’s Proposition 8–the ban on the gay marriages that the California courts had mandated earlier this year.
It is time to face facts. In spite of the largest turn-out by liberals, the largest turn-out by young people, and the largest turn-out by gays in the history of the state of California, this measure was still passed. What does this mean?
In my opinion, it means that the cause is lost. The California and Arizona defeats for state-sponsored gay marriage combined with the married-only adoption measure in Arkansas point out that no matter how much supporters want such, the majority of people in the US, even including some of the non-racist, liberal elite that elected the first black President, just aren’t comfortable with the state sponsoring marriage between men or between women. In other words, folks, if it didn’t happen this year, it’s not going to–it’s a high-water mark for the issue like 1979 was for the ERA.
It has been my opinion for decades that giving the government control over who gets married has been a disaster. Whether it be the miscegenation laws of the 1950s, the back-and-forth, now you’re married, now you’re not of California and Massachusetts, or the persecution of polygamists by the state of Texas, the government has proven that it cannot be trusted with the inalienable right of individuals to form unions as they please.
Why would anyone want the government’s nose in their business, anyway–advocates of opening the definition of marriage certainly want the government out of their bedrooms, don’t they? As always, it falls into the fallacy of money being more efffectively distributed by the government than by individual action. Those who advocate gay marriage want the so-called benefits offered to heterosexual married couples, even though many of those benefits have been offered in an attempt to control their behavior and move them toward the actions the government sees as desirable.
Urbanagora has a great crop of thinkers–folks in the economic, futurist, political, and activist realms. I’ve got a challenge for all of you to work on with me…..
Since we cannot gain what we want from the government, nor, (seeing that young people with a given opinion keep that opinion throughout their lives) can we expect to do so in the next twenty-five years, let us design a way of making the benefits for couples and multiples better than those offered by the government for heterosexual couples. We can discuss economic strategies, contracts, ways to put pressure on employers, union-like actions. I’m open to any idea that does not start out…”we get this measure passed by Congress” or “if the courts rule such-and-such.” Government has failed–it’s up to each of us to take up the slack.
Comment by Brian Pierce on 6 November 2008 at 3:12 pm:
I reject your premise that this is over. Demographics show that all we really need to wait for, frankly put, is more old people to die off. My generation is overwhelmingly accepting of LGBT people and supportive of full equality under the law. California’s results were heartbreakingly disappointing, and significantly hampered my ability to enjoy Obama’s victory. But over the past 24 hours, I’ve been able to adjust and recognize that progress is achingly slow – too slow for many gay Americans older than I am who will not live to see their fundamental rights recognized. But there’s little question in my mind that I will see over the course of my life a steady increase in the extent society treats me as an equal citizen, both legally and culturally.
Comment by Brian Pierce on 6 November 2008 at 3:14 pm:
It’s also worth noting that Massachusetts continues to recognize full marriage equality. Connecticut will begin granting full marriage equality this month, and a constitutional convention measure was rejected in that state, which was the only hope of anti-marriage equality forces in that state. New York’s state legislature gained a new Democratic majority that is extremely likely to grant full marriage equality rights to New York’s citizens, and New York already recognizes as legal marriages that take place in other states.
Comment by Tom on 6 November 2008 at 4:25 pm:
Hmmm. Brian, would you be willing to work on alternatives, then, “just in case?” I reject your premise that this is an “old person’s problem” and even if it is, what happens the day that old people stop dying off? That supposed “solution” has never worked in the past…it wasn’t that old people died that caused Obama to be elected–it was that the country finally was in a shape shitty enough for people not to care.
How about we work on replacing government recognition with something better? That way, even if we do get equal rights, someday, we’ll have a choice.
Fuck agonizingly slow–we’re more important than that.
Comment by Buck B. on 6 November 2008 at 4:32 pm:
Brian is right, this is purely a matter of demographics. Those under 29 voted against Prop. 8 by a 61-39 margin.
The youth of today are more tolerant of homosexuality than any previous group in our history, and there’s no reason to think equal rights for all people regardless of sexual orientation will be any stranger to future generations than the concept of racial equality is to mine.
Take a look at this chart. Attitudes towards homosexuality in California have flipped in just 10 years. Are you proposing that 10 years from now those numbers will not have changed further?
A few other other points. While Prop. 8 passed by a relatively healthy 5-point margin, it could have definitely gone the other way. I’ve read several places that the anti-proposition campaign was badly managed and undermanned. Meanwhile, the Mormon Church made passing this its main focus of time and money for the last several months. Additionally blacks, though less than 7 percent of the California population, represented 10 percent of voters Tuesday, and voted for Prop. 8 70-30. Without Obama on the ballot, maybe Prop. 8 doesn’t pass.
I am not saying any of that necessarily changed the result. But I am saying you can’t use this to prove marriage equality will never happen. As Brian mentioned, it’s already happened in both Massachusetts and Connecticut. As for Arkansas, it’s the only state outside of Appalachia to tend more Republican this election. Not the exactly the best barometer of where the country’s heading.
Finally, it’s not as if the Prop. 8 campaign was a rational discussion of whether gay marriage would be good for society. The campaign funded by the Mormon Church was largely based around scare tactics and misinformation, such as convincing people that it would lead to teaching homosexuality to kindergartners and such.
Just as the changing demographics of America allowed us to elect a black man only forty years after the civil rights movement, they make marriage rights for all citizens an inevitability. As I believe someone said: the arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice
Comment by Tom on 6 November 2008 at 5:04 pm:
Buck, if this is the case, and history bends toward justice without fail, then why has the ERA never been passed? 1960s feminism hit a high point and retreated and no amount of youthful demographics changed that.
Youth tend to rebel against seated authority. If a government in Washington is liberal, it would indicate to me that the kids in HS during that time (the next four to eight years) will end up as more conservative as a reaction to it.
Again, as I suggested to Brian, do your opinions preclude us discussing superior alternatives to government involvement? All this work with people who hate our guts may be unnecessary.
Comment by Brian Pierce on 6 November 2008 at 5:04 pm:
I also have a more fundamental objection to your approach, Tom. You are a highly individualist thinker. I don’t mean that in the sense of you holding a lot of unique opinions – though that’s true too – I mean it in the sense that you seem to view The Individual as having a lot more power than I think they do. We’re fundamentally social animals. All of our decisions are reactive to the society we live in – even when those decisions are to go against the grain. Finding ways for us to handle these problems ourselves is simply not adequate in my view. Social acceptance is not something I am indifferent to, and I don’t think it’s advisable to take a “Who cares what other people think?” approach to these things. I have no choice but to be affected by what other people think, and I wouldn’t want it any other way: I like participating in my community and I believe in the power of collective action. And government is an essential component of our society. I choose to care and respect what it does, even when that hurts me, because to do otherwise is to wall myself off – psychologically, emotionally, and socially – from a world I very much want to be a part of. Which means I have no other choice but to keep pushing and keep fighting – even if you’re right that it’s hopeless.
Comment by Buck B. on 6 November 2008 at 5:29 pm:
Right or wrong, marriage as created and defined by the state is central to our social structure. To deny it to anyone, even if it’s replaced with something else, is to implicitly assign them second-class citizenship.
First, let’s treat everyone the same under the law. Then we can start looking for alternatives.
Comment by Tom on 6 November 2008 at 5:52 pm:
In both cases, yours and Buck’s, I see a fundamental flaw in that you believe that government is essential for your well-bring. I hold, instead, that government is the single most important thing holding you and all of society back. At best, it’s an evil that can be tolerated in that it protects us from the strong and immoral. It is not, nor will it ever be, benign, let alone essential.
It is our enemy, no matter who is in charge of it.
Comment by Tom on 6 November 2008 at 6:25 pm:
Post-supper, pre-Queen Concert remarks….
The members of this “society” that you feel lost without, Brian, have just voted once again in three states to deny you rights that you were born with–ones granted by God and inherent in human beings.
See, if your neighbors hate you, all you have to do is move somewhere where there are a lot more of you than there are of them. That way, you’ve escaped their power. You cannot, however, move anywhere within our nation to escape the iron grip of the human rights-denying juggernaut that is our government.
Buck, until recently, marriage, as defined by our religions, was central to our social structure. Government, even three generations ago, was seldom involved. (The denial of the LDS their right to polygamy was the first involvement of the US government in basic religious rights and is certainly arguable as unconstitutional under the First Amendment.)
Everyone will never be treated the same under the law. If you wait until the day it happens, you will never devise the alternatives that we need. I find it amusing that the two of you are not even interested in discussing better ways to do it.
Why not?
Comment by Joshua on 6 November 2008 at 7:45 pm:
I’m going to break Tom’s rule, but I do think this is part of the solution.
Tom is right that at the moment the federal government lacks the political will to legislate a state sanction of same-sex marriage. There are two ways I see us getting there, that are largely focused on government action. I’m ignoring Buck and BJP’s arguments about the likelihood of demographic shifts for the purposes of this post, but I think they are right. Those who are under 29, in 20 years will be 50 and between them, and their more tolerant children, there will be a new political will. Tom 20 years ago, few would wager that we would soon have the political will to elect a black man President. Anyway, back to my scenarios:
(1) Supremes. While the political will isn’t there yet to pursue this legislatively, it may exist to pursue it Judicially, and the political will against same sex marriage is not sufficiently strong to pass a constitutional amendment banning it. Eight years of Obama Supreme Court appointments may be enough to get to 5 votes on the Supreme Court who would hold that equal protection requires full legal rights of marriage for gay couples.
(2) Incrementalism. I think the gay rights movement would be farther along today if they would have framed the debate around equal rights rather than the sacred cow of marriage. I think a ballot initiative in California framed as follows would pass easily “Whether or not you support gay marriage, do you support extending all of the legal rights of heterosexual couples to same sex couples (such as inheritance rights, hospital visitation rights, etc).” You fight this fight and win it first, afterall, which is more important, the legal function or the label? After this is fought and won, you can go after the term marriage and it’ll be an easier get, and even if it still takes a while, gay couples would enjoy all the legal benefits of marriage right away.
Comment by Joshua on 6 November 2008 at 7:47 pm:
I meant to type 59, that was a typo, not being unable to add :)
Comment by Buck B. on 6 November 2008 at 8:24 pm:
A good start for the federal government is repealing the Defense of Marriage act, which Obama has come out against many times. Gleen Greenwald has a good writeup about why repealing it would matter.
Comment by Brian Pierce on 6 November 2008 at 8:30 pm:
Josh,
California DID already recognize the legal benefits of marriage for same-sex couples before recognizing marriage itself. Moreover, gay rights organizations like HRC did and continue to focus their efforts on stuff like the Employment Non-Discrimination Act and hate crimes legislation. But when you’re an individual couple being denied the right to marry, and you speak to your lawyer, and your lawyer makes an argument to a judge, and everybody along the way agrees that you are being denied your fundamental rights, there’s nothing gay rights organizations can do to stop it. It’s just sort of inevitable.
I’m also of the view that the fastest way to advance gay rights is to thrust it as much as possible into the spotlight. Yes, that’s going to provoke a backlash – but that backlash has to be experienced before it can be overcome, so the sooner the better. Relatedly, one of the things I’m angry about is the way the “No on Prop 8″ campaign was run. If you look at the ads for it and the way leaders structured their arguments, they did everything possible to avoid the word “gay.” Their tag line was “Regardless of how you feel about marriage, it’s wrong to eliminate rights.” For one thing, that doesn’t make much sense as an argument and is kind of insulting to people’s intelligence. For another thing, it’s a highly defensive argument, and if we’ve learned anything from the past 8 years of political wrangling, it’s that whichever side is playing offense wins. We weren’t doing that this time around, and I think that’s because of the fundamentally cowardly way Democrats argue about gay rights – which is a big part of why people always argue for “incrementalism.”
Comment by Joshua on 7 November 2008 at 9:32 am:
I don’t think its rooted in cowardice, but rather pragmatism. I’m certainly not afraid to advocate gay rights directly, or of calling a marriage ban discriminatory. But the object is to win, and sometimes progress is most likely to come incrementally. Your approach risks creating a backlash that it will take a generation to overcome, and when the backlash is beat down, who knows if the policy goals will be any closer to fruition than they are right now. Reasonable people can disagree about the best way to pursue common goals and common values, unreasonable people label approaches other than their own as cowardly or homophobic, because they would rather be divisive, impudent ideologues, than win.
Comment by Joshua on 7 November 2008 at 9:36 am:
Sorry, I haven’t had any caffeine yet. Maybe we should do a point/counterpoint on this.
Comment by Todd on 7 November 2008 at 1:16 pm:
Hey everyone,
I have a friend from the Netherlands who is interested in coming to the US to help fight for same-sex marriage. I did not really know who to refer her to, and I did not know how her not being a US citizen might complicate matters, but I thought some of you here might know what to do. Any ideas? You can also email me at thetodd at g mail if you want to discuss it off this thread.
Pingback by Can you say carpal tunnel kids? : Urbanagora on 7 November 2008 at 2:35 pm:
[...] I’m on the subject of California’s Prop 8, everyone should check out Tom’s post Let’s Take Marriage Back, for an excellent discussion on the gay rights movement and what happens [...]
Comment by Joshua on 7 November 2008 at 2:36 pm:
Todd, she should get in touch with the fine people at HRC. I would imagine Jon could give her some practical advice. BJP may have other suggestions.
Comment by Brian Pierce on 7 November 2008 at 2:50 pm:
Like Josh said, HRC would be a good place to look into. The National Gay & Lesbian Task Force is another. If she’s interested in legal work, Lambda Legal would be a good option.
Comment by Todd on 7 November 2008 at 6:05 pm:
Thanks for the help, everyone! My friend really appreciates it too.