The other day, I got sucked into a discussion of whether Dan Savage is a bad, bad man for turning Rick Santorum’s name into a dirty joke. My thinking is, Santorum’s made a career off of telling people that Savage and his family are going to hell, and Savage is just supposed to take it? How well would you respond to that? I think turning the guy's name into a sex term is kind of mild, personally.
And, as I’ve noted, activism that doesn’t shock a little is kind of pointless. LGBT people and their allies are pretty tired of playing nice and hoping things get better. No one hands you anything unless you fight for it. Case in point:
Well, they’ve been trying for years to get a Constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage in our state. And now that the GOP finally controls the General Assembly, they’re pushing hard to get an amendment vote on a ballot next year.
Same-sex marriage is already illegal in N.C. So, why a constitutional amendment? Two reasons, one stated, one we’re not supposed to think about. The stated reason, according to Rep. Dale Folwell, is that an amendment will prevent our existing law from being challenged in the state supreme court – which, to my knowledge, never has been done in 15 years. Why now? That goes to the second reason: these ballot initiatives inspire conservative voters to get to the polls, where they typically stay to vote for president, etc. That’s why Karl Rove was so fond of them. This isn’t about values; it’s about politics and whatever will help this job-killing legislature cling to their jobs next November.
Back to the alleged reason for a second… if it’s true that the current law defining marriage as only being between one man and one woman could be considered by a panel of highly experienced judges to be un-constitutional, then isn’t it by definition incompatible with our state’s legal values? Scaring a majority of voters into ok-ing an amendment doesn’t make it suddenly kosher, Orwell.
And that’s setting aside what I wrote a while back, and in the Journal this week.An amendment saying exactly the same thing as an existing law is redundant, and therefore fundamentally UNconservative. For the love of William F. Buckley, what the hell?
Why is this amendment a bad idea for North Carolina? Let’s count the ways:
It’s bad for business.
If you’re an international corporation looking for a place to locate your next U.S. office, are you going to choose a state where your LGBT employees will be second-class citizens? I wouldn’t. And neither would people who've actually faced this decision. For now.
It does jack to “protect” marriage.
What exactly does your marriage need protection from? It’s a legal status, not a fraternity or an all-white country club. If your lifelong union with your spouse is in any way weakened by another person getting to visit her lifelong partner in the ICU, then you have bigger problems than an amendment can fix, honey. You don’t see Folwell trying to outlaw divorce, do you? We still let teens marry their cousins? Things like shared property and shared custody stabilize society, which is why the government offers so many thousands of incentives for married people in the first place. (What? Did you think it was because you’re a special coupled-up snowflake? The very second that marriage ever stops being good for the economy, you just watch your tax loopholes evaporate.)
It’s not a sin, and even if it were...
There is no law, and I can’t imagine there will ever be a law, that forces you what to teach your children or that forces your church to marry someone whose relationship it doesn’t approve of. (One picturesque church near where I live won’t marry people who aren’t members. No law against that.) If you genuinely disapprove of homosexuality on moral or religious grounds – I disagree with you, but it’s a free country. It’s also a civil country. Marriage may be a sacrament in your church, but what we’re talking about is marriage as a civil status. And, as we render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, we don’t bring religion into law. If that’s how you want to live, the Taliban is ready when you are.
It limits civil rights. Your rights.
Maybe you don’t know any gay people. (By the way – yes you do.) Think about the precedent this sets. Dale Folwell wants to let every voter in the state (just not the hundreds of thousands who are here for college or military service or who don’t have ID) vote on whether one segment of the population can take advantage of public protections. Today it’s gays and marriage. Fifty years ago it was African Americans and college. Hell, in my lifetime it’s also been African Americans and everything from public housing to private mortgage loans. The idea that anyone could propose a popular vote on something as fundamental as equal rights in 2011 is just mind-boggling. For a second there, I thought we’d left state-sanctioned bigotry in my mother’s history books. What’s next? Breast-feeding mothers and public parks? Parents who want to home-school their children? Parents who don’t want to vaccinate their kids? Your right to worship as you choose? Your right to own a gun or insult the president on your Facebook page? What about your life do you fundamentally know is no one else’s business? Now imagine that on a ballot. America left that stuff behind a long time ago, with good reason.
And what if a majority of North Carolinians do decide, five or 10 or 20 years from now that they do want to permit same-sex marriage? A constitutional amendment is a lot harder to overturn than a simple law, and that’s exactly why Folwell and company want to do this. They want to keep future North Carolinians from changing our collective mind. This is also fundamentally incompatible with conservatism.
“Let the people decide” is BS
Did Folwell let us vote by ballot initiative on whether to fire thousands of state employees, restrict voting rights, de-fund Planned Parenthood or force doctors to read a script during a medical procedure? No. Why do you think that is? Why is this one issue – which is already a law, again – worthy of a statewide vote? One – Republicans are whoring for single-issue voters. Two – the people supporting this are cowards. And yes, that includes any Democrats who sign on.
We have a representative democracy for a reason. Those Federalist Papers that the Tea Partiers have suddenly discovered (without having actually read, apparently) repeatedly argue that elections smooth out the rough partisan passions that divide our electorate. They are designed to be moderating forces, ideally producing a representative that can compromise between all factions. And, also ideally, these elected officials are supposed to be more informed than the rest of us. That’s why you don’t get a dozen ballots in the mail every day. You hired someone to do this for you.
The people we hired are shirking their duty. They’re not going to cast a vote. On some primitive level they won’t acknowledge publicly, they know this is wrong. And so they’re passing the buck. A hundred years from now, it wasn’t Dale Folwell’s fault that our state retrograded and signed bigotry into our foundational document. That was all you, North Carolina. It was totally out of his hands. I think that’s cowardly.
There is absolutely no good argument in favor of this proposed amendment. If you think you have one, please tell me. I want to talk about it.
No comments:
Post a Comment