On Maine, Marriage, and Democracy

Okay, your Head Trucker got on a tear here tonight and couldn't stop.  I'm posting most of it after the jump to save space on this page, but maybe somebody will read it and let me know what you think.

I'm a little pooped tonight but hope I can string these quotes into a coherent post here.  It's important to understand were we are, where we've been, and where we're going.  And by we, I mean not only gays but all Americans.

Sullivan, quoting David Link, points out the victories this week we should not overlook.

Tuesday was a great day for gay rights everywhere but Maine:

We won voter approval of (1) domestic partnerships in Washington; (2) an anti-discrimination ordinance in Kalamazoo; (3) an openly gay city council president in Detroit; and (4) an openly lesbian mayoral candidate in Houston. That seems to say something about the state of anti-gay prejudice in this country.

I agree with David that public opinion is now decisively inclusive of gay people - on every issue but civil marriage. But even on that last issue, we are now essentially neck and neck in California and Maine, the last two states to have referendums on the matter, and we are over 50 percent in Washington state for domestic partnerships that are identical to civil marriage on a state level, but without the m-word.

 Conservative blogger Rod Dreher, though, says we are barking up the wrong tree:

Unless I'm missing something, in the 31 states in which voters had a say on whether or not gay marriage was going to be the law of the land, they all rejected it. Every single state. Even California, the national bellwether state on liberalizing social trends. Even Maine, in the most liberal region of the country.

You can come up with all kinds of theories about why this is, blaming the voters for being bigots, accuse the churches of playing dirty, whatever. The plain fact is, every single time it's been put to a popular vote (as opposed to allowing a tiny number of elites to vote on it), gay marriage has been a loser. . . .

If the pro-SSM left can't convince people of the rightness of their cause, they're perfectly prepared to see their views imposed from on high. Honestly, folks, I understand the case for same-sex marriage, though I don't agree with it, but look, if you're reduced to having to tell the public that they have no right to be consulted about the radical redefinition of a bedrock social and cultural institution, then you have a big, big problem.

Ah, but here is the crux of the matter.  As someone who grew up in the segregated South and remembers it vividly, I can tell you positively that the vast majority of Southerners forty years ago right now, probably 90-something percent in most places, would most certainly have considered segregation a "bedrock social and cultural institution" that absolutely had to be preserved.  The races had to be kept separate.  History, custom, law, and even scripture all showed the necessity of it.   Tamper with that, and the whole structure of society would collapse into anarchy and barbarism and racial warfare.  Seriously.

And besides, after all the fancy talk was done, it always, always, always came down to this remark, and with my own ears I heard it said many a time among the grown-ups:  Yes, but would you want one of them to marry your sister?  End of discussion.  Nothing could follow that unthinkable, utterly repugnant thought.  (Notice how often throughout history the great questions of the day come down to sex in the end.)

Read more of this post after the jump . . . .

The more charitably minded Southerners would have said, and did say, that separate but equal was a noble goal for white society to pursue on behalf of their "colored" neighbors.  The ignorant and ungenerous simply said "I hate niggers," and with that summation blocked out of their minds all further consideration for the well-being of black people.

And - for the benefit of the younger generation who did not see those times - it's also important that I note here how very ordinary it all seemed.  "Segregation" looms up from the pages of history books and magazines now in bold face, looming over some dreadful picture of poverty or violence from the civil rights era - in the dramatic chiaroscuro tones of black and white photography.  But the world was as full of color, and shades of gray, then as it is now; the sun shone as warmly, the grass was just as green, the sky just as blue as it is now.  Everyday life was as full of activity, laughter, and entertainment as it is now:  there were cars in every color, television shows, movies, rock and roll, Cokes, amusement parks, libraries, nightclubs, Christmas trees, Kodaks.  People in the South did not drag through their days thinking of nothing but segregation, and they certainly did not, the vast majority once again, go around pushing black people off the sidewalk or spitting on them or shouting their opinions in their faces.  (Oh God, our mamas would have whipped us till we couldn't sit down, for being so rude.)
 
Not at all.  We simply lived segregation and accepted it without thinking much about it, as we did the atmosphere:  something you breathed and moved in, but rarely reflected upon.  Because the races lived apart, were schooled apart, worked apart, and rarely mingled - and even then, it was not as equals.  As a white kid, you simply took it for granted, part of the scheme of things like sunrise and sunset, that black people had their own neighborhoods, schools, churches, libraries, hospitals, and shopping districts.  Grown-ups would have been more aware of the political and historical aspects of what Walter Cronkite was saying on the 5 o'clock news, but even they rarely brought up the subject.  It was just the Way Things Were, and always had been, and anybody who questioned it was obviously a bad sort, not worth listening to.
 
How could anybody with a lick of sense question what was so obviously a Good Thing?  As amply proven, if one thought about it at all, by history, tradition, and Holy Writ.  Preachers, usually the radio type, who did treat the subject were very fond of pointing out that in the Bible, God is always saying "separate yourselves" from this group or that "because I want my people to be pure" - religiously, racially, and otherwise; He never says, "Oh, go mix and mingle, have a good time."  This specious line of reasoning sounds laughable now, but I assure you it was delivered and heard with the greatest sincerity in these parts, forty years ago.
 
Yes, to all but the most disaffected Southerners, segregation was "a bedrock social and cultural institution"; if it wasn't, what else could be?  And these tens of millions of people who lived between the Potomac and the Rio Grande were not monsters; as with any random segment of the population, some were sweet, some were silly, some were kind, some were grouchy, some smart, some stupid, some wise, some foolish:  in short, they were - and are - people of every description:  ordinary, everyday people just exactly like the kind who populate the earth today, but with one particular blind spot.  And all but a bare handful, even the most backwoods rednecks, would have argued with you that they certainly did not hate "the nigras" at all, would have denied it from sunup to sundown till they were blue in the face, and would still maintain it with their dying breath.  It was not hate at all, they would have told you with a perfectly straight face; it was simply the Right Thing To Do.  End of story.
 
Well here we all are, forty years later, in the world of telephones that take moving pictures and show you your bank balance, ovens that cook your dinner on plastic plates, and talking cars that give you the most ridiculous wrong directions that even the worst of backseat drivers would never conceive of.  But technological gimmickry aside, what is there of importance that has changed?  Well, for one thing, as last year's election proved for all time and beyond all doubt, the odd Louisiana judge notwithstanding, the mingling of the races (which, boys and girls, was always a polite euphemism for SEX), far from signalling the End of Western Civilization, is simply a non-issue in the scheme of life:  no more so than the marriage of a blonde and a brunet, or a right-hander and a southpaw.  It simply does not, cannot, signify.  End of discussion.
 
But now consider what Dreher is saying in parallel with the attitudes of Southern society forty-plus years ago.  And look at this chart from Freedom to Marry:
 

On June 12, 1967, the Supreme Court of the United States, in Loving v. Virginia, stuck down all remaining state laws banning interracial marriage.  Now I can tell you as a certain fact that if interracial marriage had been put to a vote in these states at any point before that time - and for a number of years after that point - it would have been most soundly defeated by the voters.  My own dear parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles would have voted against it; despite their usually generous attitudes towards black people, they would have drawn the line at that.

Even a significant percentage of blacks would have voted against it; I have read expressions to that effect by black writers, and I believe it; for such is our human nature, that the oppressed sometimes take on the values of the oppressors.
 
So.  What does this say about democracy in America?  Now all us good little American do-bees have it hammered into our heads from elementary school on up that "government of the people, by the people, and for the people" is the best thing, like, ever, and I would agree in general terms that it is.
 
But I suppose also that a lot depends on what "the people" means.  Democracy as usually understood boils down to the majority gets its way.  But Madison and the other Founding Fathers had a lot of debate on this very point, because there is such a thing as "the tyranny of the majority."  There is nothing inherently sacred or wise about a majority's decisions; as is perfectly clear from all I just said about the South and segregation.  And if we survey not merely American history but the history of mankind down through the ages, we see that majorities, in whatever clime or continent situated, often have been simply wrong, and wrongheaded, about all kinds of issues.  Of course it also happens sometimes that the prejudices of one generation are overturned by a succeeding, more enlightened one; but that is small comfort to an oppressed minority who have to live out their lives year after year, waiting in hope of eventual redress.
 
So then - how best to ensure the liberty and justice of "the people" if the people themselves cannot be trusted to do so?  As wise as our Founding Fathers were - and we were very, very lucky on that point, one has only to look at the contrast between the American Revolution and those of the French and the Russians, to see how fortunate we were - yet even the Founding Fathers, quite a few of them, were slaveholders. "All men are created equal" - but they certainly did not consider their slaves equal to themselves in any meaningful way.  And although Abigail Adams wrote husband John a famous letter begging him and his colleagues to "remember the Ladies" and include them in the Consitutional guarantees of rights and freedoms, her proposal was never given a moment's serious consideration by the wise founders of the Republic - all of them white men, and all of them, I'm sure, convinced that male supremacy in the halls of government, as in the home, was a "bedrock social and cultural institution" - and so did their sons and grandsons for many generations, their womenfolk's pleas and protestations notwithstanding.

Woman suffrage - the simple right to vote - not equal pay for equal work, that came much later - came about not through the work of "activist judges" but through the hard slog of lobbying state legislatures one by one by one, and eventually Congress.  Many, many, many times, the issue came up for a vote in one state house or another, and was defeated; then reintroduced and defeated again, over and over:  a long, disappointing struggle until finally attitudes changed and suffrage bills were passed.  Do you realize how long that took?  Fifty years, in this country (ca. 1870-1920).  God knows how our great-great-grandmothers found the will to persist decade after decade.

And for blacks, of course, the struggle was even longer:  a hundred years from the end of the Civil War to the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960's:  a heartbreakingly long process, opposed tooth and nail, with every argument that could be devised from Scripture and from tradition, both across the South and even outside it.  In the end, black equality had to be imposed on the South by courts and by federal law; it was never adopted by any Southern state legislature or referendum.  And I dare say, if blacks had had to wait for the one or the other, they would still be waiting today in some places.

So what does this say about the workings of American democracy?  On the one hand, our default, ingrained American thinking is that the majority rules, the majority chooses, the majority decides, and if you don't get the majority to vote with you - you are just plain out of luck, and your cause is not legitimate until they do.  Closely allied with that line of thought is the feeling that a judge, or a whole panel of judges, who overrule the sacred will of the majority are out of line, and somehow breaking the rules - not of law, perhaps, but of our American sense of fair play.

It's seeing these fundamental questions of American political belief played out that makes American history come alive, when you realize that we have all been right here before:  the tension between the majority and the minority, the "right" and the "wrong," the old and the new, has always been at work among us from the very beginning of our Republic.  Sullivan quotes a reader who has been pondering the same things I have, and saw a parallel with the Lincoln-Douglas debates over free and slave territories - remember that boring old topic from high school history?  It's alive and well, and immensely pertinent to our queer lives right now:

I . . . thought of Stephen Douglas's arguments for "popular sovereignty" -- the notion that states, especially former territories entering the Union, could vote slavery "up" or "down" as they saw fit.

Lincoln saw what a fatuous argument "popular sovereignty" was -- that it really is the destruction of self-government to allow fundamental rights to be determined by the whims of a majority. The Declaration precedes the Constitution. "All men are created equal" is the necessary preface to "We the People."

Equal rights and the consent of the governed are the principles that make self-government intelligible in the first place. Without them, of course, there are no real limits to what majorities can enact, including doing away with democratic rule. This is why Lincoln repeatedly said that lurking in Douglas's doctrine of popular sovereignty were the same arguments used to justify the divine right of kings. Once "all men are created equal" is dispensed with, once it is no longer held to apply to a certain group of people, what might limit the arbitrary rule of a few, or one, over other groups without their consent?

I understand, of course, the "legitimacy" victories in the democratic process confer on any movement. But for me, the legitimacy of the love and relationships of gay couples already is there. It's a right, grounded in our basic equality. And no majority should be able to take that away. So there's a real ambivalence here.

Here's one of my favorite Lincoln quotes, from an 1855 letter to Joshua Speed:

"I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor or degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except negroes." When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty -- to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy."

Insert "gay" for "negroes" in the above and my point is made. His logic resonates still.

Before the War, Southerners argued vehemently for decades that their "peculiar institution" - a polite euphemism for slavery - we just love euphemisms down here, don't y'all? - was a bedrock condition of their society, utterly necessary, divinely approved, and ultimately beneficial for slave and slaveowner alike - and let no one even think about changing that state of affairs.  Change was unthinkable, a betrayal of the deepest, most sacred values.  (Never mind that more than a few slaveholding men, married or not, were fond of mingling - ahem! - with their female slaves any time they took a notion to - they didn't talk about that bit.)

And yet - though they argued for it and defended slavery with the same passion with which their great-grandchildren defended segregation - they were wrong.  Utterly, miserably, ignominiously wrong.  Yet they believed themselves utterly in the right; and were willing to bring all the horrors of war upon themselves and their loved ones to maintain the right to their "bedrock institution."

Well, as a Southerner born, and an American too - for my yankee and foreign readers, the two terms are not necessarily synonymous - what conclusions can I draw from all this?  Majority rule has worked by and large pretty well for this nation when taking the very long view of things; but the Founders, whether because of or despite their own moral flaws when it came to equality for women and blacks - and we haven't even touched on their attitudes towards Native Americans, another long, tragic story - the Founders were keenly aware of the flaws and frailties of humanity, and therefore instituted checks and balances in the system, so that the tyranny of majorities could not become entrenched forever:  a bicameral Congress, a Supreme Court, a separate Executive, a federal republic of states.

Somehow, thanks be to God, in the very long run it has all worked, and worked pretty well.  But even so, as my examples show, justice can sometimes be delayed - denied - for generation after generation.  Majorities are sometimes sensible and fair; they are also sometimes pigheaded and cruel.  How long is too long to wait?  And who exactly is it that should overrule a lawful majority, either in a referendum or a legislature?

Well I've run on a long time here, and I don't have all the answers.  I just know that people like Dreher - just exactly like my fellow Southerners forty years ago, including my own flesh and blood - may not have any conscious motives of hatred against us gays, and it's actually counter-productive to label them as "haters" for that reason:  but the net effect, the result of their allegiance to what they think is a "bedrock," unchangeable state of things, is the same.  Justice denied, equality stripped, human dignity sunk.  And that's wrong - so very, very wrong.

It's been forty years since Stonewall, forty years and more that we've been fighting for equality - and coincidentally, it was forty years ago right about now that I first put together the terms "homosexual" and "me" in my mind.  And I've waited, like all my brothers and sisters of the rainbow family, all these many years for equal justice, respect, and dignity in this my beloved country.  Waited a long, long time.

It's coming, that day of justice, as it came eventually for women and blacks and others - but will I really live to see it?