quesarah | Reproduced from commondreams.org (Reply)

Published on Tuesday, November 25, 2003 by the Daytona Beach News-Journal (Florida)
Piety's Ruse: Invoking Sanctity to Label Different as Second Class
by Pierre Tristam

"Marriage is a sacred institution between a man and a woman. Today's decision of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court violates this important principle. I will work with Congressional leaders and others to do what is legally necessary to defend the sanctity of marriage."

Thus spoke homophobia.

The words were President Bush's after learning of the court decision legalizing gay marriage last week. The sentiment was folksy-traditional, a mix of Promise Keeper liturgy and pre-nuptial piety from the book of old wives' tales, White House edition. You can hear the banjo picking in the background, see the wagons circling around one more fading assumption of right and wrong. People nostalgic for the old ways probably wish they could lynch Margaret Hilary Marshall, the judge who wrote the opinion for the Massachusetts court. Old news for Marshall: She is a native of South Africa. She cut her legal teeth on the bigotries of apartheid, leading a student movement devoted to fighting that peculiar institution before going to Harvard in the late 1960s, where she began lending a hand in America's rediscovery of civil rights. Circling its own wagons against those violating the sanctity of apartheid, the South African government wouldn't let Marshall return home. She stayed here, becoming a citizen in 1977. Our gain.

Marriage's gain, too. For where, exactly, is the damage being done now that homosexuals can marry in the eyes of the law? How is the institution of marriage being "violated" when rights to marry between consenting adults are being extended rather than restricted? I don't see how my marriage is going to be affected by the fact that, say, my gay neighbors can now go to Boston and marry. It's their affair, their luck, their freedom.

Those who call themselves defenders of marriage as we have known it -- as the federal "Defense of Marriage Act" defines it, as only a union between man and woman -- imply that anything different demeans marriage. But that's like saying that giving women the right to vote demeaned men's vote or that extending freedom to blacks demeaned the freedom of whites.

Some folks reason that way still. Their self-importance depends on the second-class status of others. Superiority by race, sex or creed is no longer openly acceptable, but you can still send gays to the back of the bus and call yourself respectable, especially when you invoke tradition. In other parts of the world the same appeal to tradition defends female circumcision, child marriage, and wives immolating themselves on their husbands' funeral pyre.

It sometimes takes a so-called non-native like Marshall to remind Americans of their most basic principles, one of them being a clear-eyed refusal to be a slave to tradition, especially those traditions that exclude, that disparage, that stigmatize, that hurt for no other purpose than to preserve a sense of moral superiority for those causing the hurt. American history is full of those hurtful "traditions." It is also full of progressions away from those traditions and toward a more perfect union between the Constitution's projected fairness and decency on one hand, and life as we really live it on the other. The progression has a distance to go. But it continues.

Bush's statement in defense of marriage is worded in regression. It is masked in such words as "sacred institution" and "sanctity," evoking not just tradition, or constitutional tradition, but fundamentalist Christian tradition. It is a reach for the spiritual, the "inviolable." But it is a deceptive reach, because the sentiment behind it is anything but Christian. The strategy has a familiar ring.

"I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ," Frederick Douglass wrote in his biography. "I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land." It is Douglass' words that come to mind when the likes of Bush marshal what passes for Christian tradition in defense of what a just law could never uphold. "Indeed," Douglass went on, after describing how Christianity was misused to defend slavery, "I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity. I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels. Never was there a clearer case of 'stealing the livery of the court of heaven to serve the devil in.' I am filled with unutterable loathing when I contemplate the religious pomp and show, together with the horrible inconsistencies, which every where surround me."

Bush's promise to bar gay marriage in the name of sanctity and sacredness is one of our day's "boldest of all frauds," one of our day's horrible inconsistencies. Maybe it's unfair to single out Bush. The Democratic presidential contenders are his back-up singers on this one, their tap-dance around gay marriage and for "civil unions" being a doctrine of separate-but-equal for gays. But the coming debate will pit Marshall's opinion against Bush's 43 words. Bush, the 43rd president, may add numerology to his pomp and show. He'll need to. He doesn't stand a chance on more rational grounds.