Democrats’ gay support is welcome, but when will words translate to action?
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CHRIS CRAIN
Friday, March 19, 2004
THE CAST OF “SATURDAY Night Live” used to perform a sketch involving
a man and a woman on a date, and after each one would say something, the audience
was privy to what that person was really thinking. Usually the truth was far
afield, and sometimes the polar opposite, of what was said out loud.
Of course the same phenomenon is common in politics, but the issue of gay
marriage seems to bring out some of the worst in doublespeak. Like any contentious
cultural issue, there are partisans on both sides of this debate with principled
positions and competing worldviews. The sad thing is that none of those people
is running for president.
President Bush is, by all accounts, a committed Christian with a traditional
view of marriage as between a man and a woman, but with a tolerant and comfortable
attitude toward those gay individuals and couples he knows personally.
In the 2000 campaign, candidate Bush took the position that marriage is an
issue for the individual states to resolve. Four years later, Bush is supporting
an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would ban gay marriage but claims
he was forced to act because “activist judges” in Massachusetts
and runaway local officials like the mayor of San Francisco are usurping the
will of “the people” to decide the question.
The problem is that Bush is apparently backing an amendment that does much
more than he says he favors, and instead decides the issue of gay marriage
for all of the states by amending the country’s founding document. In
fact, the so-called “Federal Marriage Amendment” goes even further,
prohibiting marriage-like benefits and recognition, which would likely bar
civil unions and many public domestic partner registries.
If Bush really meant what he has said, he would have left the issue to each
individual state to decide and endorsed a constitutional amendment providing
simply that the courts cannot force one state to recognize another state’s
gay marriage licenses.
The Defense of Marriage Act, signed by President Clinton in 1996, said exactly
that, but conservatives worry that “activist judges” would strike
down DOMA. GOP Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, hardly a friend to gay rights, is
floating an alternative constitutional amendment that would prevent “activist
judges” from doing that; perhaps Bush will throw his support behind it.
BUT EVEN THEN Bush would not really be living up to what he says he believes
about the importance of defending traditional marriage. Discouraging gays from
entering into long-term relationships will actually have the opposite impact.
Countless “traditional marriages” have ended in tears and heartache
because one partner has used the relationship to run away from homosexuality.
It could not possibly be in the interest of heterosexual marriage to encourage
gay men and lesbians to turn away from homosexuality and instead marry heterosexuals.
Bush claims to be acting to defend the American family, but it is a fact of
life that children are already being raised by gay parents. Experts can argue
about whether a two-parent, male-female household is really the ideal for those
children, but they would all agree that a stable household of any variety is
far superior to one that is not. Long-term gay relationships provide a much
better environment for those children.
Conservative activists like Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council have
argued that allowing gay marriage anywhere will also encourage the spread of
AIDS by “normalizing” homosexuality. The public health reality,
of course, is exactly the opposite: Gay men in committed relationships are
far less promiscuous and less likely to spread sexually transmitted diseases
than those who are not.
What’s more, as long as Bush and his allies work to prevent gay couples
from marrying, private businesses will continue to provide domestic partner
benefits for their unmarried employees. These benefits are almost always justified
as a way of treating fairly gay employees in long-term relationships who cannot
marry, but the policies almost always cover unmarried heterosexual couples
as well, and straight couples generally sign up for DP benefits in much larger
numbers.
The more these companies provide an attractive alternative institution for
straight couples, the more traditional marriage truly is being threatened.
Just look at Europe, where civil union-type laws in most countries — adopted
for gay couples but open to straight couples as well — have dramatically
reduced the number of heterosexual couples who actually go the distance and
tie the knot.
UNFORTUNATELY, THE ALTERNATIVE choice to George W. Bush engages is marriage
doublespeak to an even worse degree. Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry says he
has a traditional view of marriage, like Bush, but supports full equality for
gay couples.
He has attacked President Bush for endorsing a federal marriage amendment
because it writes discrimination into the Constitution, and yet he backs a
similar amendment to the state constitution in Massachusetts, where marriage
licenses are actually to be issued.
How can Kerry be against one amendment but in favor of the other, or is he
on both sides of this issue, as the president has charged he is on so many
others? His aides would undoubtedly say that he sees it as an issue for the
states, but then why did Kerry oppose as “gay bashing” language
in the Defense of Marriage Act that protected states from having gay marriage
foisted upon them?
Kerry presents himself as a champion of civil rights, even on the issue of
gay marriage, and yet his actions are more akin to those of a governor from
the Jim Crow South, dismissing with a vague appeal to “tradition” the
ruling of his home state’s highest court that civil unions are separate
and unequal.
Kerry’s reasons for opposing for gay marriage are all over the map,
and his own treatment of the institution — obtaining an annulment of
his first marriage after 18 years and two children — make his appeals
to tradition even weaker.
We should all remember that the battle over marriage and gay civil rights
goes beyond partisan politics and a presidential election. The same activists
who have rightly condemned with loud-throated voices the president’s
position should find their voices and call Kerry into question as well.
If we can force both sides to say what they really mean about gay marriage,
we will have won half the battle.
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