The probability that the United States Government will ever provide any semblance of a reparations gesture to black Americans is, sadly, almost nil, at least in anything approaching my lifetime and well beyond (alluding to the previous blog entry). But here’s something thought to be a staple of the liberal agenda that will come to pass and hopefully soon: gays will ultimately be recognized as entitled to all of the very same constitutional guarantees as the rest of the gang.
The emphasis, of course, is mine, put there to make it clear that gay marriage, chosen as the highest-profile example, isn’t something that we are going to grant to gays, because constitutional rights aren’t granted by the prevailing majority, the president, the Supreme Court or even the supreme buffoons in Congress. They just are. If you are an American citizen, you get ‘em. End of story.
And that’s what makes the current homophobic debate so embarrassing and maddening. The outcome is known. The simple answer is that the basic protections guaranteed under the Constitution trump the pathetic fear of homosexuals that so many Americans seem to think has some kind of standing in this discussion.
Homophobia has no more legitimacy now than racism or bigotry did 50 years ago when literally millions of Americans lined up to try to hold back integration, voting rights or equal housing or employment rights for blacks. Ending Jim Crow wasn’t put up for a national referendum. The Constitution put an end to it, through the efforts – and blood – of civil rights activists and a Supreme Court that finally did the right thing.
I know a lot of blacks denounce the idea of linking their own heroic civil rights struggle with the battle gays are now facing, but as it is with many whites, that’s simply their religious convictions nuzzling up to their homophobia. The very same Constitution that protects their own right to believe in any particular religion they choose – or even none at all – protects homosexuals; we just haven’t quite evolved enough as a group to get it all straightened out, if you’ll pardon the expression.
There are few things as infuriating as the polls that get quoted every time the questions surrounding equal rights for gays surface prominently in the news, which most often means that great boogeyman issue: gay marriage. Idiotic news anchors on the various networks (and cable) dutifully recite this number of that, usually above the coveted 50 percent mark, that clearly illustrate that a majority of Americans are not in favor of gays being allowed to marry. More commonly, the talking heads note that literally dozens of states have turned a thumb’s down on gay marriage every time their spineless political leaders have cannily positioned the question of referendums aimed at little more than rallying the extreme right wing to hustle out to the polls and vote their prejudices. And the implication is supposed to be that somehow this is important to the debate.
Well, I’ve got news for all those television news drones and the millions of viewers who sit in front of their TV screens and lap up these pronouncements: what the “majority” of Americans believe about which fundamental rights are accorded to gays doesn’t mean – or at least shouldn’t mean – squat.
What would you suppose would have been the results of a nationwide poll conducted in 1954 about integrating public schools? Without quibbling that certainly millions of Americans would have come down on the “Christian” side of that question, it also seems beyond debate that many other millions would have felt that the prevailing segregated status for black Americans was just peachy. And the Supreme Court would have ruled just as it did anyway, without once visibly sticking its collective thumb into the air to gauge public sentiment on the matter.
And just as “separate but equal” was wrong 50 years ago, the current decidedly unequal status of gay Americans is just as wrong – and hopefully just as unsustainable. No matter how you configure the Court in coming years – and even with its depressingly conservative bias at the moment – it’s hard for rational adults to imagine that The Supremes could huddle up and offer a decision that says denying such fundamentally intrinsic rights to one particular group of Americans is even remotely defensible … or constitutional.
If the rabidly homophobic segment of the Conservative Right can’t muster up even a marginally coherent argument for such exclusion, especially with all of the willful ignorance and entrenched fear mongering customarily employed for such a cause, what could a Supreme Court put forth that even came close to passing the laugh test?
- T.S. O’Connell
(I’ll conclude this essay in the next blog.)