As my half dozen or so regular readers are aware I have written a couple of posts on the issue of Same Sex Marriage and Proposition 8.
In these posts I have tried to lay out my arguments for why Same Sex Marriage should be legal and why you should oppose Proposition 8.
At this point I see no point in making another lengthy argument but I would like to offer some comments on the Yes on 8 campaign and suggest a way you might think of the issue.
I have some friends who are supporting Proposition 8 and I firmly believe that they are not doing so because of any homophobia but rather because of sincere beliefs regarding the specific issues related to marriage. I think further than most voters who are supporting it do so out of sincere personal views and that they do not hold any hostile attitudes towards gay people.
However in listening to the campaign on TV and radio I cannot say the same for those who are running the statewide effort. So please allow me a few paragraphs of ranting over what I find to be a very offensive ad campaign. Unless you do in fact hate please do not assign the following to your own person.
Those who live in California are already familiar with the TV and radio ads and I don’t want to offer too much free play for those who don’t. But the basic theme of all of them is that if Same Sex Marriage is legal that the schools will ‘teach children that it is as good as traditional marriage’. This idea is promoted with a cute young child ready to be ‘corrupted’ by the evil teachings.
Now I am not quite sure what the problem with this kind of teaching is. I realize that, according to many people, the Bible teaches that being gay is wrong, and as I have said before I am not going to turn this into a religious debate.
But the same Bible teaches that being a non-Christian is wrong, indeed that it results in eternal damnation. Should we therefore teach in the schools that being Jewish is inferior ? Imagine if someone said ‘the schools want to teach our children that Jews are as good as Christians”. What would our reaction be (or at least what I hope it would be).
To make it clear I am not suggesting that any sincere Christians are anti Semitic or homophobic. They have specific religious beliefs but they also believe that we should love everyone equally, that even if we personally believe that their behavior is wrong by our own religious views. This is not only true when it comes to sexuality or faith but to many things like gambling, drinking, even dancing in some cases. We have made a clear decision that in this country we will not have religious law as civil law.
So why do we have these kinds of ads ? Well I see two reasons. The first is to try and scare voters that something bad will happen to their children. The other, sadly, is that deep down those who are sponsoring these ads do in fact hate Gay people simply for being gay. Of course to air ads that said this would not work, so they make it different.
As I said above, I respect those who sincerely support 8 for reasons of personal belief, but for those who do so out of hate, I have nothing but contempt.
Having indulged myself a bit with this rant I would like to offer a final thought to voters in California. When I was in law school I read two important cases. The first was a 1948 California Supreme Court case called Perez v. Sharp and the second was a 1967 US Supreme Court decision called Loving v. Virginia.
The California case was a first in the nation ruling which overturned a 100 year old ban on interracial marriage. Up until then a white person was only allowed to marry another white person. The US Supreme Court case struck down such laws throughout the United States.
So up until 1967 it was illegal in many parts of the country for a white man and a black woman to get married. The arguments made in support of such laws were quite familiar to us today. Some argued that it was traditional for the races to remain ‘pure’ and that for thousands of years they did not intermarry. Others argued that the Bible said that we should not intermix with inferior races.
There were not the arguments about domestic partnerships being made since no such system existed, but similar arguments were made relating to school segregation (the term separate but equal was tossed around quite a bit…).
Today of course these kind of positions are horribly offensive to most of us. Indeed today we will likely elect an African American to the Presidency. But at the time they were just as acceptable as the anti Same Sex arguments are today.
So just consider if that were the debate today. What if we wanted to say that only white people could marry white people but that mixed couples could have ‘similar rights but not marriage’. If that idea bothers you, and it should, then reconsider your vote on 8.
Thank you for listening.