And cynic that I am, for awhile I almost began to believe that it would never come to pass. Understandable, I guess, since our opponents’ venom was fierce. But so was our will to strive on – on behalf of basic human decency. On behalf of the bedrock moral certainty that our LGBTQ sisters and brothers deserved no less legitimacy in the fabric of their intimate lives than we demand for ourselves.
And so at long last here we stand, with same-sex marriage
legal across the nation. Torturous in its prologue, the reality’s been a long
time coming. And it’s no exaggeration to say that the credit for this enormous achievement
goes to millions of honest brokers - millions of strong-hearted lovers of fairness
and equality - our countless sisters and brothers whose bodies, energies and
voices coalesced in the tireless quest for everyone’s right to marry whomever
we love.
And whatever our own sexuality, we owe our bone-deep gratitude to all whose hearts were with us in the struggle, and most certainly to Supreme Court Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, Ginsburg, Breyer and Kennedy, whose courage, eloquence and adherence to our Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment ultimately won the day.
And whatever our own sexuality, we owe our bone-deep gratitude to all whose hearts were with us in the struggle, and most certainly to Supreme Court Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, Ginsburg, Breyer and Kennedy, whose courage, eloquence and adherence to our Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment ultimately won the day.
Make no mistake, that on the 26th of June, when
the anxious, hopeful crowd on the steps of the Supreme Court exploded in
raucous howls of unmitigated joy, I was right there with them in my warrior’s
heart of hearts. And when the Washington Gay Men’s Chorus raised the National Anthem, I was pretty much brought
to tears, in much the same way as my eyes welled over when I stopped at a red
light on the day President Obama was first elected to office and saw a black
man openly weeping in the vehicle beside me, America the Beautiful wafting softly from his window, a big American
flag carefully unfurled across his dashboard.
So what does it really mean when we join our hands across
cultures and races, straight, gay, old and young, to help “the moral arc of the
universe” bend a little more precisely towards justice? In this day, this
fateful hour, in the face of our myriad challenges as a nation and as a world,
it means everything.
But now, as sure as anything, we hear vicious voices from a hard
conservative right arguing that it’s quite within the purview of “religiously
motivated” court clerks around the country to ignore the law – the Constitution,
for God’s sake – and continue denying marriage licenses to LGBT partners.
Really?
What if “religiously
motivated” folks had simply refused to comply with Brown v The Board of Education? The
Voting Rights Act?
More pertinently, what if folks had simply chosen to adhere
to their “religious beliefs” and continued to deny blacks and whites the
freedom to marry even after the Court decided in favor of the Lovings in Loving v. Virginia, the landmark 1967 case
concerning the white Richard Loving and black Mildred Jeter. They were legally
married in Washington DC
only to be later arrested on race-mixing felony charges in their home state of Virginia . In Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court
held that their right to marry was protected by law.
How is this relevant to the “religiously motivated” argument
for denying same-sex marriage equality now?
Consider this: There are still people alive and kicking who
percolate with the particular brand of racism which holds that black people
were created by God as inferior beings to whites and that any attempt to “mix”
the races flies in the celestial face of God’s eternal plan. In fact, many of
this “religiously motivated” ilk believe in the supposed origin of black folk
as the biblical children of Ham. Ham, of course, was the renegade
son of Noah who was cursed by God for looking upon his drunken, passed-out
father’s naked body.
In fact, some accounts hold that Ham sodomized his besotted dad, said curse being levied - even now - as a punishment upon the current-day descendants of Ham. How? In the form of our dark skin, of course, which marks us, by the hand of God no less, as the eternally blighted progeny of Noah’s sinful son.
In fact, some accounts hold that Ham sodomized his besotted dad, said curse being levied - even now - as a punishment upon the current-day descendants of Ham. How? In the form of our dark skin, of course, which marks us, by the hand of God no less, as the eternally blighted progeny of Noah’s sinful son.
That being the notion, let’s just suppose some zealous court
clerk somewhere (in Texas ,
perhaps?), based on religious belief in the woeful story of Ham, decides
to refuse a marriage license to a mixed-race couple? After all, what about the mongrel children of black-white couples? Does the world need any more of them - partially righteous, partially lesser? Clearly, that's the repulsive thinking that undergirds this view.
According to the conservative logic of the knuckle-dragging crowd, some of whom aspire to the White House in 2016, it seems that this sort of bigotry resulting in the refusal to grant marriage licenses based upon so-called “religious motivation” - in this case, tied to race - might be wholly justifiable.
Twisted and hateful, full up to their rolling eyeballs with misguided religious bile, apparently they’d get to deny marriage licenses to mixed-race couples and still retain their jobs. The question becomes, then, how is this different from denying same sex couples marriage licenses based also upon “religiously motivated” grounds? It’s not different, of course, and that’s the point.
According to the conservative logic of the knuckle-dragging crowd, some of whom aspire to the White House in 2016, it seems that this sort of bigotry resulting in the refusal to grant marriage licenses based upon so-called “religious motivation” - in this case, tied to race - might be wholly justifiable.
Twisted and hateful, full up to their rolling eyeballs with misguided religious bile, apparently they’d get to deny marriage licenses to mixed-race couples and still retain their jobs. The question becomes, then, how is this different from denying same sex couples marriage licenses based also upon “religiously motivated” grounds? It’s not different, of course, and that’s the point.
Clearly, last Friday, June 26, 2015 a majority in the
Supreme Court made themselves abundantly clear on the matter of marriage
equality and their decision, coincidentally, reflects the affirming sentiment
of our country by and large. It’s settled law now. The law of the land, as they
say.
But what of the dissenting judges, and most particularly the
heteronormative, tone-deaf mouth-breathers Scalia and Clarence Thomas? As has
been noted by others, Thomas would not be married to his white wife
today had it not been for the Court’s 1967 decision in favor of Richard Loving
and Mildred Jeter.
The fact is, I certainly don’t always agree with the Supreme Court’s
decisions. But that surely doesn’t mean that I feel free to retreat into a contorted
permutation of religious extremism in order to ignore their rulings with the
kind of myopic fervor that’s fueled bigots throughout time. But that’s just me,
I suppose.
The truth is this. As much as I celebrate the Court’s ruling
on marriage equality, this is simply not yet the time to relax our resolve.
Unfortunately, bigoted souls and minds aren’t changed by judicial wisdom, it seems,
no matter how dulcet the flavor of hard-won victory at the time.
Still, I was watching the evening news that night with my 91
year old mom, who's the learned, lettered embodiment of progressive wisdom and grace, when the darkness opened its soul over President Obama’s White House robed in
a vivid display of rainbow-colored lights. A kindred voice in the background
was waxing philosophical about life and family and goodness and love. We
smiled, my mom and I, in a mutual observation: at the end of the day, there’s something
singular about justice – its fragrance, its essence, its multifaceted beauty – that
settles ever so sweetly upon the mind and in the heart.
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